Black and grey hand with a blade through it and red drips of blood, tattooed on the upper arm and shoulder in a traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand and blade on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A stylised hand, shaded in black and grey, is pierced by a blade that runs diagonally across it, with small engraved markings along the handle. Red ink highlights the tip of the blade and bright red drops run down beneath it. The design fills the upper arm and rounds over the shoulder, with the shading giving the hand a solid, sculpted look against the plain grey background.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Hand Blade Knife Blood Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The knife came to me wrapped in oilcloth, stiff with old grease, tucked under the bench beside the stove. My father never let us touch it. On Sundays he would unwrap it on the table and turn it over in his palm, the way other men read the paper, and tell me the little markings on the handle were the names of boats he had worked before the war. I never found those names on any register.

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We lived aboard the Constance, a sixty-foot barge that carried coal and sometimes timber between Goole and the chemical works at Selby. The river did not care about sentiment. In the winter of the great frost the ice came thick against the hull, and my father went out on the foredeck with a lantern to break it from the rudder. I heard him call once, not loudly, and then the lantern went out.

When they fished him out below the lock, the knife was in the cabin drawer where he had left it. The blade had gone dull and the edge was chipped. Mum said the cold had got into the steel. I didn't argue. I carried it up to the grinder on Bridge Street, a man called Mr Oduya who worked a wheel behind his shop, and asked him to bring back the shine.

He held it to the window and frowned at the engraving, then laughed, not unkindly. 'That's not a name,' he said, tapping the handle where the marks ran. 'It's a tally. Every time he went out on the ice, he cut one more. Count them and you'll know how many winters he had.' He gave the wheel a turn, a fine red dust ran off the blade onto the stone, and I stood in the smell of it and counted.