Black and white line drawing of four hands, two views each, showing geometric and spiral tattoo designs across the back of the hand and the wrist.

Marquesan hand and wrist tattoo designs

Hand · Black and grey · Flash

This is a black and white line drawing on a plain page, showing four hands in two sets of views, labelled A and B with numbered sub-views. The designs cover the back of each hand and the wrist, built from spirals, scrolls, stepped geometric bands, ovals and rows of short tick-like marks. Solid black fills contrast with fine outlines, and the composition is arranged in a grid with small letter labels beside each design.

Hand Hand Wrist Spiral Geometric pattern Scroll Oval Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reef had gone quiet again when Tepua came down to the drying racks and found her uncle's bone needles still wet from the night before. Nobody had told her to touch them. She sat on the upturned canoe and copied the marks he had scratched into the sand: a spiral, a scroll folding back on itself, then a row of short strokes like rain on a tin roof.

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Her uncle used to say the lines were not drawn but followed. The spiral was the way the eels turned in the lagoon mouth before the tide went out. The stepped bands were the steps cut into the cliff path, counted by feet. The ovals were the two stones that marked the family's fishing ground, and the little strokes were the days since the last storm. He had never written any of it down, so when he died in the wet season the lines went with him, or so the village believed.

Tepua did not believe it. Each morning she walked the cliff path counting steps, watched the eels turn, and drew what she saw onto the back of her own hand with a sharpened thorn and charcoal from the cookhouse. Her aunts laughed until they saw the lines were true. By the end of the dry season the children were asking her to mark them too, and the old men stopped calling it foolishness.

When the big boats came back at the turn of the year, they found the lagoon marked on every hand that waved them in. The skipper, who had come to buy shell, stared at the spirals and asked who had made the map. Tepua shrugged and said the eels had done it, and the thorn had only been careful.