Close-up of a hand with red nails and a line of gold dotwork across the fingers and back of the hand, with metallic wave bands on the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Gold dot and metallic wave designs on a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Colour · Photo

A hand with red-painted nails rests against a plain cream wall. A line of small gold dots runs from the knuckles across the back of the hand and along the fingers, and two metallic bands with wavy, interlinked patterns in gold and silver sit around the wrist. The metallic designs appear to be temporary skin transfers rather than ink, and the soft, even lighting shows their shine clearly.

Dotwork Geometric Hand Forearm Dot Band Wrist Finger Nail Metallic Gold Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The rain got into the theodolite box again, so Father has taken the good instrument down to Keswick and I am left with the marking. You will laugh, but I have been dotting the route across Hause Gap with gold leaf, one small disc every twenty paces from the cairn at the lip to the sheep fold below. Mr Hebden at the gilder's shop in Kendal cut me a sheet of the thinnest leaf, and I press each dot down with the blunt end of a bodkin, then breathe on it so it sticks. The shepherds say they can see the line from the far side of the valley when the sun is low, and they have stopped asking whether I am mad.

Yesterday the mist came down at noon and I lost the line twice. I stood still and listened for the becks instead, and when the cloud lifted there was a single disc on a flat stone, shining like a coin someone had dropped. I had not put it there. Mrs Armitage's boy had been running up with a message and had pressed one of my spare leaves onto his own wrist to make me laugh, and then forgot it was there. Beside it sat the two bands he had bought at the Kendal fair, silver waves with a gold edge, and I thought how neatly they would sit on the old walls of the pass.

I am sending you a strip of the leaf in this letter, folded in tissue. Wear it on the cuff of your good coat, or better, leave it on the first step of the Lakeland road so whoever climbs after you knows which way to go. I will be at the fold on Thursday, and I will keep the line straight until then.

Yours, Ellen