Black and grey realistic flash design of praying hands wrapped in a rosary beneath a scroll banner reading INRI.

Praying hands with rosary and INRI scroll

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded drawing of two hands pressed together in prayer, with a dark rosary looped through the fingers and ending in a small cross. A rolled scroll banner above the hands carries the lettering INRI in bold, shaded capitals. The image is monochrome, with soft greyscale shading on the hands and banner against a plain white background.

Realism Lettering Praying hands Rosary Cross Scroll Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The council wanted the banner finished before the second shift, so Marta Quill worked under the sodium lamps of the Ring Four sign shop with her collar up against the draught from the vents. Her brush was loaded with carbon black thinned by a drop of ethanol, and she was shading the last curl of the scroll where it rolled back on itself like cured hide. Her grandmother had taught her capitals from a flaking manual salvaged off a dead freighter. Every stroke had to stand as straight as a strut.

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Jorin, the dock foreman, leaned in the doorway with a mug of recycled tea. 'Four letters,' he said. 'What do they say?' 'A title,' she said. 'The old crews nailed it above a man they had condemned, so everyone would know who he was.' He frowned at the grid of seed-lamps overhead. 'Why would anyone want that over the bay?' 'Nobody wants it for the words,' Marta said. 'They want it because it looks like something that lasted.'

After he left she looked at the rosary hanging on a nail by the door, a loop of counterweight beads strung on wire by a woman who had worked the bay before her. Each bead had been counted through a bad shift by somebody's thumb. The beads had worn bright on one side only, where the hand went.

When the last shadow under the I was done, she blew softly on the paint until it dried matte and hung the scroll on the rail to cure. Below, the bay doors opened and closed, opened and closed, ship lights blinking like a tally. She switched off the lamps and left the letters in the dark, each one standing straight, waiting for morning to show the shift what they meant.