Black and grey photograph of three small fine line tattoos on fingers: an eye with rays, a crescent and a chevron, with rings worn on two fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Minimal eye, crescent and chevron finger tattoos

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Three small tattoos sit on separate fingers of one hand: an eye with radiating rays and dots above it, a open crescent moon shape, and a downward chevron with two dots beside it. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on the skin. The soft, out of focus dark foliage behind the hand gives a plain, muted composition.

Fine line Hand Eye Ray Crescent Moon Chevron Dot Ring

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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

Nobody at the Clarendon Ballroom in Hallam Bridge ever understood the marks on the cloakroom tickets, and that was the whole idea. I had the tin of brass tokens and the stub pencil, and from the spring of 1947 I stamped each ticket with a sign instead of a number. An eye with its rays meant the doorman on the side steps had dozed off, so go out that way. A crescent meant the bandleader would take one more request if you caught his eye at the interval. A chevron pointing down meant the constables had come in off Mill Street, and you should leave your good coat with me and walk home in your shirtsleeves.

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My brother Dennis was the only one who ever asked me to explain, and I wouldn't. He liked to think the signs were a code for something grander, smugglers' business or a girl's name, and I let him. The truth was smaller. Half the girls in town had been dancing with men they'd been told not to dance with, and the marks gave them a way out without a scene. I learned to read the hall the way my mother read tea leaves, by the set of people's shoulders and whose hands kept finding the same back.

On the last Saturday before the hall was sold, a girl came to the cloakroom with her ring already off and pressed into her palm. She didn't ask for a sign. She asked for a dot, two dots, anything small. I drew the crescent on her ticket and then, without thinking, a second one beside it. She folded the ticket into her glove and left by the front doors, in full view of everyone, with her coat still on the hook behind me.