Black and grey fine line tattoos of four male portrait heads on the fingers of a hand, with a small outlined triangle on the middle finger.

Four portrait heads and a triangle on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Four small portrait heads are tattooed across the fingers of one hand, each in black ink with fine hatched shading that suggests engraved banknote-style artwork. Two heads face forward and two appear in profile, with the outlines and shading kept tight to the shape of each finger. A small outlined triangle sits on the middle finger below the portrait, and the background is dark green textured fabric.

Fine line Hand Portrait Head Triangle Engraving Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The four proofs had been pulled on the same wet Tuesday, and by Thursday they had already started to quarrel over who was worth the most. Mr Halloran kept them pinned to a board above the press in the back room of his print shop on Crane Street, where the light came in grey off the canal and the ink smelled of linseed and old pennies. He called them his family, though he never said it kindly.

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The one in profile, with his hair swept back like a man leaving a room, claimed he was the only one who had ever been spent. The two facing the room said nothing, which everyone knew meant they agreed with him. The fourth sat apart at the edge of the board, and Ada, who swept the floor and cut the sheets, had noticed that the small triangle scratched beneath him was not a printer's mark at all but the place where the trimming knife was meant to stop.

One evening, with her mother's rent three weeks overdue, Ada lifted that fourth proof down and carried it home under her coat. She did not forge anything. She only borrowed the face, pressed it to a clean sheet and watched it come up sharp enough to fool a sleepy man at the bakery counter. He gave her change and a sugared bun for the girl she said was her sister.

She was back at the press before Mr Halloran unlocked the shutters, the sheet folded flat in her apron. He held it to the window for a long time. Then he took the trimming knife from its hook and set it against the triangle, not against the face. "Stop where the mark tells you," he said. "Anything past it belongs to me." She hung the proof back on its nail, and the triangle sat there looking exactly as it always had.