Black and grey scorpion tattoo with a curved tail and raised claws on the back of a hand.

Scorpion tattoo on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey scorpion with a curled tail and raised pincers covers the back of a hand, with its legs spread across the skin. The linework is dark and defined, and the body segments and tail are shaded with grey tones to give them depth. The scorpion sits centrally on the hand and is photographed against a plain white background, with partial tattoos visible at the top left and along the edges of the image.

Hand Scorpion

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came up the hill road on the last cart of October, stamped with the name of a Whitby fishmonger nobody at Caldbeck Keep had ever heard of. Mrs Pryce prised the lid off in the great hall with a bread knife, and straw spilled across the flagstones, and out of it, slow as a clock hand, came a scorpion the colour of wet slate.

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I was the one sent to catch it, being the youngest and the least use for anything else. I knelt with a jam jar and a sheet of card while it reared, tail arched over its back like a question nobody wanted to answer, pincers opened wide enough to hold a coin. Its legs went out across the stone in thin black lines. It did not hurry. Nothing in that hall hurried. The place had been a ruin for two hundred years and had learnt patience from the damp.

Above the chapel door there is a lintel carved with a figure no one has ever explained. It is a scorpion, worn nearly smooth, its tail curled over its head exactly as this one had held its own. The old steward said a mason from the Holy Land cut it in payment of a debt, and that the family never settled the account, so the stone was left there as a warning to creditors. I did not believe him. I thought the carving was simply the only thing in the Keep that had been waiting for something to come back.

I carried the jar up the chapel stair and tipped the card out beneath the lintel. It climbed the wall in a few unhurried steps, found the worn place that matched its own shape, and stopped there with its tail curled over its head, as if it had finally been filed where it belonged. When I came down, Mrs Pryce had swept the straw into the hearth and did not once look up at the door.