Black ornamental linework drawing of a hamsa hand with floral motifs and a red and blue circle holding a white lightning bolt at its centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with lightning bolt emblem

Mixed · Flash

A line drawing of an open hand, the hamsa shape, filled with fine black ornamental patterns including flowers, scrolls and dotted detailing. A red and blue circle with a white lightning bolt sits at the centre of the palm. The linework is dense and symmetrical on a plain light grey background, with the only colour in the red and blue circle.

Hamsa Hand Lightning bolt Flower Circle Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The man in lane nine had a battered biscuit tin on the passenger seat, and he kept his palm flat on its lid while I checked his papers, as if it might lift off without him. Hamsa, he said when I asked. Five fingers, for the five senses or the five prayers, depending on which aunt you asked. His aunt had painted it on the tin herself, forty years ago, in a kitchen in Larnaca with the shutters open to the goats.

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I asked him to step out and open the tin, which is the sort of thing I do forty times a shift and rarely think about. Inside, wrapped in a tea towel printed with lemons, was a bundle of letters in blue biro, a tin of loose tobacco nobody had opened, and a small enamel badge with a red and blue circle, a white bolt split down the middle. The badge had been polished so often the colours had worn pale at the edges. He said it was for his uncle, who drove a bus through three winters and never once got struck. The aunt wanted the uncle's brother to have the badge, because the brother fixed radios in a shed in Kent and had never been able to sleep through a thunderstorm.

The form said declare anything of value. The badge was worth nothing. I wrote it down as a brooch, ticked the box for personal effects, and handed the tin back across the counter. He took it with both hands and tucked it under his arm like a loaf.

I waved him through at ten past four. In the wing mirror I watched his hand go back to the lid as the barrier lifted, holding it down against the wind.