Black and white photo of two hands clasped together, each ring finger wearing a black banded ring tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Matching black band ring tattoos on fingers

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands are interlaced, and each ring finger carries a tattoo of a thick black band with a thin inner line. The bands look solid and sharp-edged, and the photograph is in black and white, so the shading and tonal contrast are clear. The hands fill most of the frame, with dark painted nails and a tiled floor visible in the background.

Blackwork Hand Ring Band Stripe Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Skerrin Head had been dark for three nights when Morag Dunlin went down to the shingle with two lengths of tarred rope and a bone knife. Her father had kept the light for thirty years and never once let it fail, but the oil had run short and the wicks had gone to damp, and the boats were out past the reef with the wind backing round.

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She did not climb the stair. She sat on the wet step at the foot of the tower and worked the rope, twisting the strands tight and binding them with waxed thread until each length made a ring as thick as a thumb. Then she blacked them in the soot from the lamp chimney, rubbing until the tar sank into the fibre and the edges went hard and clean. A thin line of white cord she laid into the centre of each, so that when she turned them to the grey light they looked like bands cut from some other, better metal.

Her brother Ewan had gone out in the Mary Gray at dusk. She had promised him, the morning he sailed, that she would keep the light, and she had not. The rings were a thing her mother had made for her father, and her grandmother before that, a way of saying that the sea could not have the whole of a person while the other stood on land holding the far end of the rope.

When the boat came in at first light, nobody spoke. Ewan stepped onto the stones, saw the ring on her hand, and held out his own. She slid it onto his finger, and the oil was lit again behind them before the sun cleared the headland.