Black and white drawing of a hamsa hand tattoo design with blackwork outlines and dotwork detailing on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

The design shows a stylised hamsa hand with five digits, a central eye-like motif and a pointed drop shape at the base, with dots hanging below and above it. The linework is bold, with solid black outlines and areas of black filled against white, and fine dots and radiating sunburst lines add texture. The image is a single-colour drawing on a plain white background with the motif centred.

Blackwork Dotwork Hamsa Hand Eye Dot Sunburst Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ruth,

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The ovens were lit at four this morning and I still have flour in my eyebrows. Nan's hamsa is back above the proving room door, the one you thought was too gaudy to keep. I repainted the palm last week because the black had gone grey with steam, and I was careful with the middle eye, the one with the dots around it, so it looks straight at whoever kneads the dough.

Before the sun came up I sat on the upturned crate by the back step and waited, which is what Nan always did. The sky over the car park went from ink to the colour of weak tea, and then the first light hit the high window and split into lines across the floor, just like the rays she drew round the edge of the palm. Mr Okafor says it's bad luck to sit down during the bake. I told him the eye was watching the bread, not me.

A boy with a paper round came in at quarter past six with a coin clenched in his fist and asked for the cheapest thing we had. I gave him the burnt heel of the cob, the one I'd have binned. He grinned as if I'd handed him gold.

I think Nan would have liked that. She always said the hand was there to remind us that the small kindnesses are the ones that keep a door open. Come and see it in daylight, and bring the good scissors, the ones you hid from me in 1998.

Love, Mags