Black and grey linework tattoo of a hand gripping a tattoo machine and marking a small arrow, placed on the upper back.

Hand holding a tattoo machine on the back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a hand gripping a tattoo machine, with its coil cord trailing down the design, and a small arrow with a few dots beside it. The linework is black with dense parallel hatching that gives the hand and machine a shaded, engraved look. The design fills most of the frame on the upper back, with partial lettering visible at the top edge.

Back Hand Tattoo machine Arrow Dot Cord Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on Skerra would let Ada Fenn mark their skin after the winter she gave the ferryman's grandson a gull that flew backwards, so when the lighthouse keeper's boy came up the shingle with a bleeding thumb and a stubborn face, she sat him on an upturned creel and fetched the brass machine from its tin.

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The machine had come off a mainland cutter in exchange for a barrel of salt cod, and it buzzed like a wasp in a jar. Ada wound the cord round her wrist twice, wiped the boy's arm with vinegar, and asked him what he wanted. 'Something that brings my father back,' he said. 'Something that points.' She had no drawing for that, so she sketched it in the air with her needle hand, a short arrow with its head toward the water, and beside it three dots for the boats that had come home from the Gannet bank without him.

She worked slowly, the needle humming through the hatching she had learned from her mother's old engravings, line beside line, until a hand gripping the machine rose out of the skin like something cut from wood. The boy watched the cord loop away down his arm and asked whether it would ever stop. 'Only when the tide turns,' Ada said, which was true of everything on Skerra.

When she was done she rinsed the needle, coiled the cord, and set the machine on the rock above the tideline. By morning the gulls had pecked the cord to ribbons, and the boy came back with his mother to ask why the arrow pointed at the cliff instead of the sea. Ada looked at the mark, then at the water, and said the sea had already had its turn.