Black and grey hamsa hand tattoo with an eye and heart at the centre, placed on a woman's ribs beside a grey tank top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand tattoo on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey hamsa hand sits on the side of the ribcage, with an eye and a heart at its centre. The outline is finely drawn, and the fingers and palm are filled with ornamental patterns, shading and small dots along the lower border. The image is a close, slightly angled shot of a smiling woman's upper body, with her face cropped out of frame.

Dotwork Ribs Hamsa Hand Eye Heart Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamplighter of Saltmarrow kept a brass hand on the wall of the harbour office, palm out, fingers spread, and every night at the ringing of the bell he would press his own palm to the cold metal before climbing the stair. Nobody in the town could say who had cast it or why. The fishwives said it kept the nets from tearing. The clerk said it was only a bell-bracket that had been painted over so often it looked like a hand.

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One November the fog came in off the estuary and stayed three nights. The lamps went out one by one until only the harbour light burned, and that one was low. Dorrit Vane, who had gone out to bring her brother's boat home, saw nothing but grey. She heard the bell from the wrong side of the water, and then the bell stopped. Her brother had gone up the stair to trim the wick and had not come down.

She went to the harbour office with wet hands and found the brass hand on the wall. It was warm. Under the palm, where a lamplighter's thumb would rest, someone had scratched a small heart and, beneath it, a round eye with a dot for the pupil. She pressed her own palm over it and felt the metal tremble, the way a sleeping dog's flank trembles.

She climbed the stair counting the steps the way her mother had taught her to count fish. At the top her brother sat with his back to the lamp, asleep in his coat, the wick trimmed bright. She shook him awake. The fog pressed against the glass like a face, and it did not get in, and by morning it had lifted off the water and gone.