Black and grey traditional tattoo of two hands holding a wishbone, flanked by roses with leaves, across the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hands holding a wishbone with roses on chest

Traditional · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo shows two hands reaching toward a wishbone shape at the centre of the chest. A rose with leaves and a curling tendril sits on each side, framing the design. The linework is bold and outlined, with solid black areas and grey shading on the hands and petals.

Traditional Chest Hand Rose Leaves Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire only warms the front bench, and I am too old to shout over the back row. Now. The Pell sisters of Hollin Cross had one goose between them at Michaelmas, one wishbone, and a quarrel that had lasted since the spring floods. Nell wanted the wish. Mab wanted the grease for her lamp. Neither would let the other take the first pull.

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So the miller's boy was sent for, because he had clean hands and no opinions. He stood between them in the yard holding the pale bone up like a bridge across the cobbles. Nell reached with her left hand, long fingers and a ring of blue glass. Mab reached with her right, quicker, her nails bitten to the quick. Both hands closed on the wish at the same moment, and the bone sang, a thin high note like a wet finger round the rim of a glass.

Nobody in Hollin Cross had ever heard a wishbone sing. The old women crossed themselves, and the goose, uneaten, walked off towards the rectory. Nell laughed first. Mab did not. They stood with their hands still touching across the bone, and the roses along the churchyard wall, which had been red all summer, opened their petals wider than any rose should, black as ink in the dusk.

The bone never snapped. It hangs in the church porch still, one thread of it wound with blue glass, and neither sister ever made a wish out loud again. They had no need. Each had the other's hand on the wish, and that was the only sum they ever agreed on.