Black line tattoo of two outlined hands in fine line style on the upper arm, with a small dot on the palm.

Outlined hands on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A single-line outline of two hands, one resting over the other, with a small dot on the lower hand. The linework is thin, even and black, with no shading. The tattoo sits on pale skin against a dark background and a grey fabric edge at the left of the frame.

Fine line Upper arm Hand Outline Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last ferry to Skerry Holm left at dusk in the year the sea took the lighthouse, and Orla Brennick was on it with a tin box of seed potatoes and no ticket. The keeper's wife at the landing did not ask for one. She only looked at the box, then at Orla's hands, and said the island had been waiting for someone who could count to forty without moving their lips.

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The island was made of hands. Not people's hands, the old woman explained, but the stone kind, flat slabs set on edge along every field wall, each one cupped as if it held a bird that had flown off. When a slab was lost to the weather, a new one had to be carved from the cliff and laid over the gap, and it had to be laid by two hands, one resting on top of the other, because a single hand only ever dropped things. Orla had no idea what that meant. She carved for three winters anyway.

In the fourth spring she cut a slab that would not sit. She turned it, planed it, sent the boy down to fetch the marker stone. At last she knelt in the wet grass and pressed her own palm to the rough face of it, the lower hand under the upper, and felt the grain warm beneath her skin. She made one small dot with the point of the chisel, where the thumb of the bottom hand would have rested, and the slab settled with a sound like a door closing gently in another room.

The ferry came back that autumn and the keeper's wife was still on the landing. She took Orla's tin box, opened it, and found it full of the same pale stones, each one marked with a single dot. Nobody on the island ever told her what the dots were for. Orla simply went home across the water with an empty box and a warm place in the middle of her palm.