Hand and forearm with a glowing violet skeleton design on the back of the hand and wrist, shown under ultraviolet light.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Glowing skeleton hand under UV light

Forearm · Colour · Photo

The image shows the back of a hand and forearm with a skeletal bone design that glows violet and blue under ultraviolet light. The bones of the fingers, hand and wrist are outlined in clean, fine lines, with the forearm bones running up towards the elbow. The skin is otherwise dark, with a tiled wall and a dark background behind the hand, and it is unclear from the photo whether the design is UV-reactive ink or UV body paint.

Forearm Hand Skeleton Bone Hand Wrist Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea gave off its own light that autumn. Dad called it bad luck, the way the plankton flared blue in the wake of the Mary Ellen every time we cleared Newlyn harbour, and the nets came up sparking as if they'd been dipped in cold fire. Uncle Tom said it was the drowned, lit from below, and that a careful skipper counted them before he shot his gear.

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We counted them most nights, Tom with the deck lamps off and his head bent to the echo sounder, me on the rail with a bucket of bait. Forty-odd boats from the harbour wall, each one a smear of white on the radar, and the water between them flickering violet wherever a hull cut through it. Tom said the bones of a shoal show up brightest, that the old men could read the fish by the ribs of light moving under the swell.

In February the Gull Rock wasn't on the radar. We found her at first light, upturned and half sunk, her nets still trailing lit threads where her skipper had been hauling. Nobody spoke on the way back. Tom took the wheel and steered by our own wake, because he said the sea was honest about what it kept, and I should be honest about what I'd seen.

I still count the boats on the way out. The lights come up one by one along the wall, and when the last of them is steady I stop counting and watch the water, which is never quiet, and which I know now is only showing me the shape of what lies under it.