Close photo of dark Hebrew lettering tattooed across the back of a hand, with a silver band ring resting on the knuckle above it.

Hebrew lettering across the back of a hand

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is shown from the back, with a line of dark Hebrew lettering tattooed across the back of the hand and wrist. The letters are crisp, solid and evenly weighted in black ink, with a sharp, clean edge. A silver band ring engraved with Hebrew letters sits on the top of the knuckle, and the pale skin and plain white background keep the focus on the ink.

Lettering Hand Hand Text Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Rivka, the silver came up from Haifa on Tuesday in a twist of oilcloth, and I have spent three evenings bent over it with the lamp pulled close. Mrs Abramsky wants the band engraved on the inside and the outside both, the same words in the same hand, so that whichever way the ring turns against a sleeve the family name will be there. I told her a letter cut into silver is only honest if it is cut as patiently as it was first drawn. She laughed and said her husband never once in forty years waited for anything.

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You asked why I make you practise the strokes on the back of your own hand with the ink pen before you touch the burin. It is because the skin will tell you when your wrist is lying. A line that wobbles on the hand wobbles on the metal too, and a bad serif on a ring is there until the sea takes it. Every letter needs the same weight from the first stroke to the last, the thick and thin kept where the old scribes kept them, and no flourish that the eye has to stop and forgive.

Snow came down the lane this morning and I could not feel my fingers by noon, so I stopped and sat by the stove with the ring on the bench between us. The words catch the light the way frost does on a gate. When I finished the last letter I found I had been holding my breath, which is foolish for a man my age.

Send me your next sheet of practice letters. I will mark them in red and you will be cross with me, and that is how it should be. Yours in the cold, Abba.