Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Safety pin tattoo on the back of a hand

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small safety pin is outlined in thin black linework on the back of a light-skinned hand, near the base of the fingers. The pin is shown open at a slight diagonal, with simple shading along its coil and clasp. The composition is close and centred on the tattoo, with a second hand resting on top of the first and a grey knitted sleeve and dark phone case blurred in the background.

Fine line Hand

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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 lost property office under the arches at Leeds closes at ten, but Marjorie Tennant never leaves on time, because the drawer marked Miscellaneous always holds one more thing. Tonight it is a child's wellington boot, a bus pass for a man called Sunil Patel who died in March, and a paper bag of conkers gone hard as stone.

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At twenty to eleven the rain starts sideways against the glass, and a woman in a wet raincoat knocks on the shutter. She has lost a brooch, she says, a silver moth her gran pinned to her collar every Sunday. Marjorie searches the trays, then the bins, and finds only a single brass safety pin under the radiator, bent open and rusted at the clasp. She holds it up. The woman shakes her head, then takes it anyway and turns it over in the strip light, as if it might be the moth after all.

Marjorie tells her that a pin is good for holding things together, because she has said the same to a hundred people with a hundred scraps of nothing. The woman fastens it to her lapel, closes it with a small click, and walks out into the orange puddle light without asking for a receipt.

Marjorie locks the drawer, then the shutter, and stands a moment on the wet pavement. Behind her the radiator ticks as it cools, and somewhere under the arches a train goes over, rattling the glass in its frame.