Black ink gothic lettering across four fingers spells NICE on a hand, with the C drawn as an outline shape.

NICE lettering across four fingers

Lettering · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Black ink letters spell the word NICE across the fingers of a raised hand, one letter on each finger. The lettering uses an ornate gothic style with thin, decorative strokes, and the third letter is an open outline shape rather than a letter form. The ink is solid black on a light skin tone, set against a soft, blurred background with warm red and dark tones at the edges.

Lettering Hand Lettering Word Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire's only good for the people nearest it, and you're the one who asked about the hands. Right, then. Old Teodor kept the crossing at Vadul for thirty-one winters, a wooden hut with one window and a barrier painted the colour of wet tobacco. Every guard who came to him wanted papers, and every traveller wanted to be waved through before the papers were read. He had a rule about that. He said a man who has to be asked twice is a man who has something to hide, and a man who hides nothing needs no reminding of his manners.

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His daughter Ilse came to work the hut the winter the river froze hard enough to walk on. She had letters inked across her knuckles, one to a finger, and when the lorry drivers squinted at them they read the word out loud and laughed, because it was the least likely word anyone had ever brought across that bridge. The third letter was a plain outline, a shape like a bird folded in half, which she said was a swallow and the drivers said was a bit of Hungary. Teodor hated it. He said a word on the hand was a word you had to keep honest.

One January a convoy stopped with a man in the back who had no name on any list. Ilse held her hand up against the window, slow, fingers spread, and the young officer read N, I, C, E, and the bird between the I and the E, and then he read it the way you read a sign you were meant to obey. He lifted the barrier himself.

Teodor watched from the stove. Later he took her hand in both of his and turned it to the light, and said the only true thing he ever said about tattoos: that they are just the words you already decided to say, pressed in where you cannot scrub them off.