Black and white photo of a fine-lined ornamental tattoo with scrollwork and leaf shapes on a finger, with a second ornamental tattoo partly visible on the back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental band tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a hand showing a black ink ornamental tattoo wrapped around the base of a finger. The design combines curling scrollwork, a horizontal band and downward leaf or petal shapes with a small teardrop detail. A second ornamental tattoo is partly visible at the lower left edge of the frame, and the hand is shown against a soft, pale background.

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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

Put the kettle on, and don't look at the guard like that, he's only doing his sums. You want the rest of it? The customs man at Halmer Bridge wouldn't let the lace through, because he could not read it. He said it was writing, and writing has to be declared. So old Ilse unpicked a hand's width from her hem and laid it on the counter, and the whole queue leaned in to see.

Keep reading

It was a band, you understand, no wider than a thumb. Along the top ran a curl like a fern that has been told a secret, and under that a straight line, then another, to keep the scrolls from wandering off. Below the lines hung petals, pointed and heavy, the way a bell skirt hangs when it is still wet. And at one edge sat a single drop, as if the cloth had only just come out of the river and not yet dried.

"What does it say?" the customs man asked, and Ilse said, "It says come back before the frost." He studied the petals for a long time. Then he stamped the form, pushed it back across the counter, and said the lace was clear to pass, so long as nobody tried to sell the drop.

Years after, the man's grandson took the same pattern to a tattooist in the city, because he wanted a band he could carry without a box to declare it. The drop he kept for himself, and that, my friend, is the part of the story nobody has ever managed to stamp.

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