Interlocking triangles on the back of a hand

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of three interlocking triangle outlines sits on the back of a hand, below a dark leather jacket cuff. The linework is thin, uniform and solid black, with no shading. The design is centred on the hand against a plain, dim background.

Geometric Fine line Hand Triangle Geometric shape Hand

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly out and the cook has gone to his bunk. You want to know why the three triangles push through one another like men shouldering into a crowded hall? I'll tell you what Hallvard the smith told me, though he was drunk and may have been lying.

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Hallvard was asked by the jarl of Skarnes to make a clasp for a dead man's cloak. The jarl wanted a knot that would hold a thing shut even after the hands that closed it had gone cold. Hallvard sat three nights at his anvil in the wet boathouse, hammering iron into points, and each time he finished a triangle it would not lie still beside the others. Every edge he set cut through the next one. He swore the iron was resisting him, and he cursed it, and his wife said it was the first honest thing he had said all winter.

On the fourth night he stopped trying to make the shapes fit and drew them instead in charcoal on the boathouse wall, following wherever each point wanted to go. When the charcoal met itself, he did not lift his hand. He carried the line back to the start, and the whole figure closed without a seam. The clasp he forged from that drawing never once came undone, the old men say, though nobody has ever seen the cloak it held.

So when you see that knot inked on anyone, do not ask what it holds. Ask where he learned to draw without lifting the charcoal. That is the only part of the story Hallvard was sure of.