Colour traditional-style tattoo of a hand gripping a beaded ring medallion, shaded in gold and brown, on the back of a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand holding a beaded medallion on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a hand gripping a circular ornate frame with a dotted beaded border, with a pointed object extending downward from the hand. The hand and frame are rendered with bold dark outlines and smooth gold and brown shading that gives them volume. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame, with bare leg skin and a grey paved surface behind it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The toll-keeper at Harrow Ford had one good hand and a brass seal set into the other, and everyone who crossed the river bridge knew the mark: a ring of beads, a fist closing round it, and below the fist a pin as long as a finger. Travellers pressed their papers flat against the rail and the pin went through them. Nobody argued with the pin.

Keep reading

One February a carter called Tobiah Wren came down the bank with a cart of salt and no papers at all, only a folded letter with no name on the outside. He held it out. The keeper did not take it. "Read it to me," she said, "and I will know if you lie." Tobiah unfolded the paper and his mouth moved, but the words were not his own. They were the words his mother had spoken at her bedside, asking him to keep walking east until the bells stopped.

The keeper turned the letter over and set the pin to the wax. Where the point went through, the paper gave off a smell of wet ash, and the ink ran into the shape of a second fold. Inside was a pass made out to Tobiah Wren, with the date of crossing left blank, to be filled in on the day he came back the other way.

"You'll be wanting the return," she said. "They always do." He pushed the salt over the bridge, and behind him, in the far village, the bells began, one stroke for every bead on the ring, and the keeper wiped the pin clean on her sleeve and waited for the next cart.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.