Mint green painted wooden hand mannequin decorated with a traditional style rose, anchor, heart and banner design.

Painted wooden hand with traditional designs

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A mint green articulated wooden hand mannequin is painted with tattoo-style designs across the palm, fingers and wrist base. The largest motif is a purple and red rose with yellow highlights and a green leaf, alongside a small anchor, a red heart with a ribbon banner reading FOR, and black stitches and dots. The linework is bold and black, with flat colour fills, and the piece sits against a plain white wall with a potted cactus to the right.

Traditional Rose Anchor Heart Banner Stitches Dot

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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

The hand came out of the joiner's yard in Gosport the week the ferry stopped running on Sundays, wrapped in a bedsheet and smelling of lacquer. Mrs Tully had ordered it for her shop window, a dummy to hang bangles on, but she never got round to paying for it. Her nephew Danny, home from the Navy with nothing to do but drink, borrowed a tin of mint enamel and a box of brushes and went at it on the back step.

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He worked from the wrist up. Ants first, because his mother swore they got into everything on that step, then dots across the knuckles, then a row of stitches down the outer edge where he'd once been sewn up after a bottle fight in Southsea. The anchor went on the thumb side, small enough to hide under a cuff. The rose took two evenings. He copied it off a flash sheet pinned inside the chip shop window, and he gave the petals yellow highlights that he couldn't have justified to anyone.

The banner he saved for last. He painted FOR across it, then stopped with the brush dripping, because the heart beneath it needed a name and he had none to put there. Nell from the bakery had told him she'd think about it if he stayed off the rum for a year, and he had counted the days on the calendar above the sink, though he had not yet reached the end of the first month.

Mrs Tully hung the hand in the window that Monday, fingers spread like a woman swatting a wasp. People stopped to read the banner and smiled at the ants, and Danny watched from across the road with a pint going flat in his hand. The hand pointed at the harbour the whole week, as if asking the gulls what the weather would do.