Flash design of a hand making a V sign, filled with a galaxy pattern, with the word SHAMBLES across the palm and a black cross motif, on a white background.

Galaxy hand with Shambles lettering

Hand · Colour · Flash

A hand raised in a V shape is drawn as a silhouette filled with a nebula pattern of purple, pink, blue and black, with small white stars scattered across it. The word SHAMBLES runs across the palm in white capitals, with single black letters placed along the fingers and thumb, and a black cross-like motif sits in the centre of the palm. The design sits alone on a plain white background with a clean, centred composition.

Hand Hand Galaxy Nebula Star Lettering Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The gulls have been mad all week. On Tuesday the nets came up full of light, and Dad swore the sea was doing its own sums. The water went purple and pink at the edges and sparked wherever a boot touched it. Mrs Pryce said it meant a wreck out past the Shambles bank, so we all knocked three times on the wood before we went out, the way she always makes us.

I went out to the end of the mole with the lamp you rigged from the bent spoon and counted stars where there should have been none, low over the water, as if the night had come loose from its pegs. I thought of your letter, the one with every word scrambled, and how we spent a whole summer working out that you only read every second letter. I tried it on the sky. All I got was a word that sounded like a mess, and I thought you'd laugh.

Today the cross-shaped buoy at the Shambles went dark. Dad rowed out with Pryce's boy and came back with it lashed under the stern, the lamp smashed and the chain wound round a brass cross that nobody can date. He's put it on the mantel. It still gives off a faint green glow when you hold your palm over it, and the glass has gone cloudy with the same pinks and blues as the water.

So come home on the spring tide and read the second letters yourself. The stars are still there over the mole if you hold your hand up and make the sign for two, the way you did on the quay the morning you left. I'll be at the end of the mole with the lamp.

Your loving sister, Nell