Traditional style tattoo of a hand forming an OK sign, wrapped in a grey cuff with red peonies and leaves, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand making an OK sign with red flowers on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A hand forming an OK sign emerges from a grey cuff, surrounded by red peony-style blooms, a red five-petalled flower and dark green leaves. The linework is bold and black, with smooth shading on the skin tones and cuff. The palette is limited to reds, browns, grey and black on pale skin, with the design centred on the forearm.

Traditional Forearm Hand Flower Peony Leaves Cuff

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit down, the lot of you, and mind the candyfloss, because this is the one about Silas Crane and the glove that wouldn't come off. Silas ran the Michaelmas fair out of Doncaster for forty summers, a conjuror with a grey wool cuff buttoned tight at the wrist, and everybody said the hand inside it was the cleverest thing on the field. He could palm a sixpence from a farmer's ear. He could make a dove out of a handkerchief, and once he made a bishop's hat vanish from the bishop's own head, which got him run out of Lincoln.

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One wet September a girl called Tilly Marr came to the wagon with a paper bag of peonies she'd picked from the vicar's wall, and asked him to show her how the ring trick was done. He held up his right hand, thumb and forefinger folded into a circle, the way you'd tell the world all's well, and said, "Everything is fine, and nothing is what it seems." She laughed. He didn't. The cuff had gone cold.

That night the hand would not go back up the sleeve. It stayed out in the lamplight, circling its finger and thumb, and every time Silas tried to tuck it away, the red blooms at his wrist opened a little wider, as if they had been waiting all their lives for somebody to notice them. Tilly came back at dawn with the vicar's shears and cut the flowers loose. Silas walked off the field that morning with one hand empty, and he never did another trick.

So when you see a hand making that sign at you across the fairground, you know what to do. Smile, nod, and keep your own cuffs buttoned.