Black ink ornamental blackwork tattoo covering the back of a hand and fingers, with bands of fine lines and filigree patterns.

Ornamental blackwork bands across the back of a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with the back and fingers covered in black ornamental tattoo work, shown from the wrist to the fingertips against a dark jumper and pale background. Horizontal bands of parallel lines alternate with filigree scrollwork, and small geometric motifs and dots sit on the finger segments. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the photograph is taken at a slight angle with the fingers spread.

Blackwork Geometric Hand Ornament Filigree Band Dot Geometric motif Line

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is nearly spent and the lamplighter has gone home to his wife across the river. You'll want the one about Ada Quill and her father's pattern book, the one he wouldn't let her open. Mind the step. The whole street was built on a sunken chapel and it still sinks a little each winter.

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Ada was a lace-cutter's girl in Dockmoor, where the ships came in smelling of tar and oranges. Her father kept a book of ironwork patterns from a foundry that burned down before she was born: scrolls that curled back on themselves like frost on a pane, and bands of fine parallel lines that the old men said were a kind of shorthand for keeping secrets. Every night he sat at the bench with his loupe and copied them onto the cuffs of the night watchmen, who paid in coal and bread.

One frosty night a watchman came to the back door with nothing to offer but his bruised hand and a request for something that would not wash off. Ada took the fine needle from her father's drawer. She did not copy the scrolls. She ruled the lines first, straight as railway sleepers, then let the filigree climb between them, a dot where the pulse ran, a small diamond on each finger so the bones would know their names. Her father found them at dawn and said nothing, which in Dockmoor is the same as a blessing.

The watchman walked his beat for forty years after that, and the city never once lost a warehouse on his round. Ada's work went out after him, one hand at a time. If you pass the Anchor on a cold night, look for men who keep their gloves on indoors. That is where the pattern lives now.