Black and grey razor tattoo on the back of a hand, with further dark tattoos on the forearms, while the hand holds a cigarette.

Razor tattoo on the hand, holding a cigarette

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close shot of two hands holding a lit cigarette, with smoke rising to the left. The back of the hand carries a black and grey tattoo of a straight razor with a dark outline and solid shading. Further dark tattoos sit on both forearms, partly out of focus, and the nails are painted black with silver rings on two fingers.

Hand Forearm Cigarette Smoke Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had shaved the abbot every Thursday for thirty-one years, and every Thursday he complained that the water was cold. I kept the straight razor in a tin of camphor oil on the shelf above the sink, the blade stropped on the back of my own belt until it would take the hair off a knuckle. Nobody else in the house was trusted with it, which is why I was surprised when the novice Piers came into the sacristy one morning with a packet of cigarettes held low in his fist, as if the Virgin herself might be watching.

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We went out past the bee boxes, to the stretch of wall where the ivy was thick enough to hide two men. He lit one with a match he had stolen from the kitchen and passed it to me without a word. I smoked it slowly, the way I had done as a boy in the pit yards before the Lord had found me a better use for my hands. Piers asked me how I had learned the shave. I told him the truth: my father had taught me on a Sunday, with the grain and never against it, thumb pressed flat on the spine, and a steady breath held in the chest.

He asked whether I would show him properly. I said no, but I took the razor from my coat pocket anyway, because I had carried it there all week without knowing why. I laid it in his palm. He turned it over, the light catching the steel, and his face went very still, the way a boy's does when he realises a thing is heavier than it looked. I finished the cigarette and let him keep the smoke, which rose over the wall grey and unhurried, past the chapel roof and out towards the road.