Black line tattoo of two hands holding a tattoo machine, placed on the side of a hip and buttock, with a gloved tattooist's hand visible below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hands holding a tattoo machine on a hip

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two outlined hands gripping a tattoo machine, with the machine's coil and grip drawn in solid black. The linework is bold and even, with areas of solid black fill on the machine and shading on the hands. The photograph is taken from behind the wearer, with white lace underwear and a gloved hand in the lower frame.

Blackwork Other Hand Tattoo machine Glove

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dennis had kept the coil machine on the potting bench for eleven years, wrapped in a tea towel between the trowels and the bags of bonemeal, because his late wife once said it was the only thing in the shed that looked like it wanted to be picked up. Each March he unwrapped it, cleaned the contacts with a cotton bud and a drop of methylated spirit, and set the points by feel, the way his father had set a carburettor.

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The allotment backed onto the railway, and the fence was chicken wire gone the colour of weak tea. Mrs Achterberg on the next plot grew dahlias the size of dinner plates and asked every spring whether he had finally thrown the thing out. He told her it was a grip for pulling stubborn roots. She did not believe him, and he did not mind.

In April his grandson Tomasz turned up with a sketch on the back of a seed invoice: two hands, both gripping a machine, the grip drawn heavy and black. He wanted to know how the hand should sit. Dennis's own fingers had stiffened over the winter, so he stood behind the boy, folded his knuckles over Tomasz's, and pressed the machine into his palms. "Lighter," he said. "You're not digging. You're writing."

They spent the afternoon making lines on carbon paper, the buzz of the old coil rising and dropping over the sound of a passing train. By six the boy's strokes had stopped wobbling. Dennis pinned the best one to the shed door beside the hose reel, and the next morning Mrs Achterberg came over to ask what the drawing was, and he said it was a map of the roots.