Small black jack-o'-lantern face tattoo on the side of a finger, shown against a plain white background.

Jack-o'-lantern tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A tiny jack-o'-lantern face sits on the side of a finger, with two triangular eyes, a triangular nose and a wide toothy grin in solid black ink. The lines are bold and simple, and the design is small enough to sit neatly on one finger segment. The plain white background keeps the focus on the tattoo and the skin, and the silver nail polish is visible at the fingertips.

Hand Jack-o-lantern Pumpkin Face

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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

Old Nan Pellow kept the lamp at Scarrow Point, and every year on the last night of October she carved a face into a swede, because the pumpkins never came over on the carrier's cart. She cut two triangles for eyes, one for a nose, and a grin wide enough to hold the sea's bad temper. The lodgers at Gull House thought it a daft custom. Then the herring boats came in late one October with nobody aboard who could say which way the harbour lay.

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Nan set her swede on the sill of the top window, the one that looked over the mudflats, and went to bed. In the morning the lantern was still on the sill, but the face had been turned. Its grin faced the water now, not the house. Nobody had touched it. Her grandson Tom, out on the Mary Ellen with the rest, swore he saw that grin from the end of the jetty and steered by it.

The girls who kept the house later told visitors the story over breakfast, passing the marmalade. They said the trick was to carve the face small, so the storm couldn't read the whole of it at once. Nobody agreed on what that meant. Nan's own rule was simpler. Carve the face small enough to keep in your pocket, so whoever was out there would know it came from home.

Tom kept the swede until it dried to a hard brown knot. He put it in a drawer at Gull House, and on dark nights the lodgers would hear him open that drawer, close it, and go back to bed.