Traditional style tattoo of a hand with red painted nails and a pale green cuff on a forearm, with a dark grey shadow silhouette behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hand with red nails and shadow on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hand with red painted nails and a pale green cuff is shown in full colour, with a dark grey silhouette shape behind it that reads as a shadow. The hand is rendered with bold dark outlines and flat, solid fills, with some soft shading on the fingers. Part of another tattoo with pale blue and dark wing-like forms is visible at the top edge of the frame, and the photo is shot close up against a dark blue and orange background.

Traditional Forearm Hand Nail Cuff Shadow Wing

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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

The queue at Dornbrook has been stopped for forty minutes, and the boy in the back seat has run out of patience and out of things to look at. You lean across the gearstick and press your hand against the window where the sun hits the glass, and a shadow comes up across the grey upholstery like something let out of a box. Two fingers for ears. A thumb that bends and snaps. The boy laughs so hard he hiccups.

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Officer Haskell, who has checked passports at this crossing since the wall came down, watches from his booth. He has a face like a closed ledger, but when the boy's rabbit hops across his desk he unbends enough to raise one eyebrow. "Is that a hare or a dog?" he asks. "Hare," says the boy. "Obviously." The officer stamps the passports without reading them, which you suspect is a kindness he would deny.

He holds his own hand flat against the counter while he works, and it makes you think of his grandmother's good coat, pale green wool gone soft with washing, the one she wore the winter she crossed with nothing but a bag of onions and a letter sewn into the hem. She taught him the rabbit with the lamp on the kitchen table. He has never told anyone that, and you have only guessed it from the way his fingers curl when he thinks nobody is looking.

The barrier lifts. You drive through with the rabbit still bounding across the dashboard, and in the mirror the officer's hand is raised, a dark shape on the white wall of the booth, a last shadow waving you on.