Close-up of a clenched fist with four small black fine line tattoos on the fingers: a round face, a paintbrush, an easel and a tin or cylinder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four small doodle tattoos on fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A clenched fist shows four small black tattoos, one on each finger, drawn in simple outline. From left to right they show a round face with dots, a paintbrush, an easel and a short cylindrical object. The linework is thin and even on pale skin, with no shading, and the blurred graffiti background is in warm and cool tones.

Fine line Hand Face Paintbrush Doodle Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody at the reunion remembered that Dale and I had once been the two worst students in Art, so when Mrs Okafor's old tin of ink pens came out of a carrier bag on the trestle table, everyone assumed it was a joke. It wasn't. Dale had kept it for twenty-six years, the lid dented, the labels half gone, and he rolled it across the cloth towards me like a bowling ball.

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We had drawn our own little symbols on our knuckles that summer, the year the council painted over the wall behind the bike sheds. He chose the round face because it looked like the potato he kept in his coat pocket for luck. I chose the brush. Between us we had one good eye for shapes and no patience for shading, so the easel and the tin were the only things either of us ever finished.

He asked whether I still painted. I told him the truth, which was that I had painted one wall in Leeds in 2009 and the landlord made me sand it off. He laughed so hard that the woman beside us turned round, and for a minute we were fifteen again, arguing about whose easel was more crooked.

When the lights came up, he pressed the tin into my palm and closed my fingers over it. The lid was cold. Inside, under a dried-up stub of graphite, was a folded square of paper with a sketch on it, one line, thin and even, of a face I didn't recognise, and beneath it his handwriting: your turn to draw the next one.