Black and grey line drawing of praying hands wrapped in a rosary with a cross hanging below, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Praying hands with rosary design

Realism · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two hands pressed palm to palm in prayer, with a string of round beads looped across the fingers and hanging down to a small cross at the bottom. The linework is clean and fairly detailed, with soft grey shading on the knuckles, fingers and folds of skin. The design is shown on a plain off-white background, with a thin border around the edge of the image.

Realism Praying hands Hand Rosary Bead Cross

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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

Dear Tom, the rosary your father carried to Valparaiso is in the parcel with this letter. There are fifty-nine beads, and I counted them twice before wrapping them in his grey handkerchief, so you will know none have gone missing on the post road. The little cross at the end has been rubbed smooth by his thumb. Hold it the way he did when the wind got up, and you will feel where his hand used to rest.

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Mrs Pryce from number nine says I should not be sending you anything that might go over the side. I told her the sea has had plenty of chances at you already and has not managed it yet. Every evening since the Lydia cleared the Mersey I have sat by the window with the beads looped over my fingers, the way the old picture in the chapel shows, and I have said a decade for every watch you are standing. Father Donnelly says that is not how it is done. He has never had to keep a ship afloat in his head.

I have lost count a few times, I will confess it. The fishmonger's boy knocks at the back door at the wrong moments, and the kettle sings, and once I found I was up to the eleventh bead of a decade I had already said. So I have started going by the tide tables pinned by the scullery door instead. High water is at a quarter past six. When it turns, I know you have just come off watch and gone down to your hammock, and I stop.

The cook at the chandlers' stall told me that sailors fret more about bread than about storms. If that is true, tell your cook from me that I put a shilling in the parcel for a proper loaf, and that the Lord has better things to be doing than rising dough for him.

Your loving mother, Ada

P.S. Mind your footing on the ladders in wet weather. I have not asked God for a dry deck. I have only asked for you.