Black and grey handprint tattoo with four standing figure silhouettes on the fingers and a red wash across the lower palm, on a person's torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Handprint with four standing figures

Other · Mixed · Photo

A large handprint filled with soft black and grey shading, with four dark human silhouettes standing on the fingers and tips. The lower palm and base of the hand are washed with red ink that fades into the skin, giving a painterly, bleeding effect against the black.

Other Hand Silhouette Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The madder vat had gone cold by the time Ada Lowe thought to fetch the boys, so she dipped her own hand in the last of the red and pressed it flat to the lintel beside the door, the way her mother had done whenever the men went up into Hollin Dean for timber. Four palms the wall had held that spring. Tom, Jack and Wilf had laughed at the mess. Sam, who was fourteen and not yet allowed his own axe, had made his print very carefully, fingers spread, and asked if it would wash off.

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They went up the track at first light, and she counted them to the bend, four dark shapes against the bracken until the trees took them. For three weeks the carter brought news down from the dean: the oaks were coming down clean, the sawpit was dry, the foreman had a cough. Then the carter came back on his own, turning his hat in his hands, and he had Wilf's cap rolled up inside his coat.

Ada went up into the wood with a lantern and nobody to stop her. She found Sam on a stump at the edge of the clearing, dry-eyed and holding a bucket of water he had forgotten to carry anywhere. He said Wilf had gone back for a dropped saw where the ground was soft, that the others had stayed to dig, and that he had been told to wait. He held out his hand to show her he was unhurt, and she saw the forge soot still in the creases of it.

They walked home together in the dark. At the cottage she lifted the lantern to the lintel, where four prints had faded to rust and shadow, and she laid her palm over Sam's, the smallest, and counted the fingers beneath hers until she was sure they were all there.