Grey handprint tattoo on the inside of a wrist, with a small blue script word beneath it, against a striped fabric background.

Handprint tattoo on a wrist

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A solid, dark grey handprint sits on the inside of a wrist, with the fingers spread and the palm clearly defined. A small piece of blue script lies just below the thumb side of the palm. The photograph is taken at an angle against a striped, multicoloured fabric, with the hand raised slightly.

Forearm Hand Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You press your hand flat to the back step's whitewash before anyone is up, the way Gran showed you, and the soot from the coal bunker comes off on the lime like a glove. Your father laughs from the kitchen doorway and says you've made a proper print, the sort the pit inspectors would sign for. Outside, the wheel at Hartley Colliery is already turning, and the sky over the rows is the colour of wet slate.

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He takes his snap tin and lamp off the hook and goes down the back lane with the other men, their boots loud on the setts. You stand on the step in your nightshirt until the cage bell has stopped echoing, counting the fingers of the print where it's already drying grey at the edges. Ada, your sister, writes her name in blue pencil beside it because she says a print needs a label, like the jam.

Rain comes over the hill by dinner time and the whitewash runs, the mark softening at the edges but holding in the middle, where you pressed hardest. Mrs Pryce next door tells you to scrub it before the landlord sees, and you say you will, and you don't. You watch the water find the lines of your palm and carry the soot down into the gutter in thin dark threads.

At six the whistle goes at the pit. Your father comes up the lane with his face black except for two white rings round his eyes, and he stops at the step, looks at the wall, and lays his own hand over yours, grit to grit, so that the old print and the new one sit together on the wet lime. "Still there," he says, and you realise he has been waiting all day to see it.