Black and grey realism tattoo of praying hands above cursive script lettering, on the back of a person's neck.

Praying hands and script on the back of the neck

Realism · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of praying hands fills the nape of the neck, with shaded highlights and soft tonal gradients across the fingers and knuckles. Below the hands, flowing cursive script lettering is outlined in black with grey shading. The photograph is taken straight on and in black and white, with the top of the frame showing the person's fingers and a tattooed letter on the knuckles.

Realism Lettering Neck Praying hands Script text Hand Neck

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Before the bell at St Aldwyn's rang five, Mother Odile would press her hands together over the trough, the way she did every morning, and the dough beneath them went quiet. Her son Piet said it was nonsense, that flour was only flour. He thought so until the winter the mill stopped and the sacks held nothing but grey dust and weevils.

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On the third morning of that winter a stranger came to the back door with snow on his shoulders and asked for bread for his daughter. Piet had only the heel of yesterday's loaf. He gave it anyway. The stranger broke it, handed back half, and said the oven would take heat by midnight if the baker kept his palms open. Piet did not understand, but he went to the trough and laid his hands flat, not folded, and felt the dough lift under them like a cat stretching in the sun.

Word went round the lanes. By Candlemas people queued in the dark with their own tins and no coins to offer, and Piet baked until his knuckles split. Odile stood at the door with her hands tucked in her apron and watched him. When he finally sat down on the flour sacks, she took the ladle from his fingers and wrote with a wet thumb on the bread board the names of everyone who had come that week. The letters ran off the edge, because there was never room for all of them.

The board hangs in the bakehouse still. On still mornings the smell carries down the lane before the bell, and if you press your palm to the warm crust you can feel the loaf rise to meet it.