Fine line tattoo of two outlined hands above the word MEANWHILE in spaced capitals, in black ink on a limb.

Outlined hands with MEANWHILE lettering

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows two open hands in simple black outline, one raised upward and one lower and palm up, with minimal interior detail. The word MEANWHILE is set in spaced capitals beneath them, in the same black ink. The linework is even and thin, and the tattoo is shown in a close, straight-on photograph against a blue fabric background.

Fine line Lettering Other Hand Outline Word

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shaft at Harrow Clough had swallowed nine men by the time Ada Brierley started going to the pit head each morning with a flask and nothing to put in it. Her brother Tom was still below, somewhere past the fourth level, and the overman said there was no sense in waiting. Ada waited anyway. She stood by the winding wheel with her shawl pulled tight and watched the cage go down empty, then come up empty, and the men who stepped off it would not look at her.

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On the seventh morning an old haulier named Pell, who had worked the deep galleries before the roof came in, took her by the wrist and walked her to the lamp room. He said the men below had a signal, older than the company, for when a hand could not be reached. You raised your hand, and the one below laid their palm beneath it, so the rock knew there were two of you. He said it was foolishness. Ada knew it was not, because she had seen her father do it through the kitchen window every evening when the shift ended, and she had never once asked why.

She climbed onto the stone bench at the top of the shaft and lifted her right hand toward the dark. Far down, faint as a match struck in another room, something answered. A cold palm met the underside of her wrist, slid away, and came back, and she understood that Tom was not crushed beneath a fall but was working his way toward a gallery that might still breathe. Meanwhile the wheel began to turn. She kept her hand up for the length of a long shift, and when the cage finally rang, her wrist was numb and her brother was walking out of the dark with one hand held high in front of him, as though he were still feeling for her.