Black ornamental designs with bands, dots and mandala-like motifs across the fingers and backs of both hands, with pale pink almond nails.

Ornamental finger and hand designs in black ink

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two hands rest on a grey knitted fabric, showing ornamental black designs across the fingers and the back of each hand. The motifs include bands with dotted and scalloped edges, leaf-like forms, crown shapes, a central medallion and small dots, and the linework is fine and even. The image is in black and grey, with the pale pink nail polish as the only other colour.

Hand Mandala Ornamental Dot Band Crown Leaf Medallion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire is only half a fire tonight, and I am too old to tell this one twice. You want the tale of Brother Tobin and the psalter? Then hush and watch my hands, because they are the only honest witnesses left.

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Tobin came to the abbey of St Wendra on the fen edge the winter the river froze to the mill wheel. He was a copyist, a good one, and a vain one too. He could set a crown on a capital letter so fine that the abbot wept over it, and he was proud of every dot. The abbot gave him the great psalter to finish, the one with seventeen borders of vine and lattice, and Tobin set to work with his quills and his pots of oak gall.

The ink froze in its horn before the second border was done. Tobin thinned what was left with warm ash water and worked on through the dark, and by Candlemas he had only a single drop of black in the bottom of the pot. He did not stop. He took the last of it on the tip of his smallest quill and began to draw the borders on his own fingers, band by band, dot by dot, so his hands would not forget the pattern while the ink was gone. Brother Osgar found him at dawn with his fingers blackened to the knuckle, asleep over the vellum with a bead of ink still wet at his thumb.

When the psalter was finished, the abbot called Tobin to the lectern to receive his praise. Tobin lifted his hands, and the abbot saw the crown ringing the second finger, the leaves climbing the knuckles, the small dots running down to the wrist. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said the book was finished twice, once on the page and once on the man.

The ink wore off by the spring. Tobin's hands did not forget. He would hold them up at Lauds, the crowns still faint across his fingers, and say that the saint's border had been carried in the warm and not the cold, and that was the part worth keeping.