Black and white drawing of six forearms and hands, each with a different traditional-style tattoo design including a mandala, skull, rose, eye in a triangle and crossed bones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six hands with black ink tattoo designs

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

Six hands and forearms are drawn in a row, each carrying a different tattoo design. The designs include mandalas, a skull, a rose, an eye within a triangle, crossed bones, a heart with dotted shading, a key, a dagger and wings. The linework is bold and clean, with shading in solid black and fine stipple, and the whole sheet is rendered in black ink on white.

Traditional Blackwork Geometric Forearm Hand Mandala Skull Rose Eye Triangle Heart Key Dagger Wing Arrow Laurel Anchor Cross Flash sheet

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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 press had flipped the sheet on Tuesday, so every hand in the proof was a left hand pretending to be a right one, and Ruth stood over the bench with a magnifier and a cup of cold tea, counting knuckles. Six forearms, six designs, one sheet of cartridge paper she had inked by lamplight for three weeks. The mandala at the top was fine. The skull was fine. It was the eye in the triangle that worried her, because Dennis from the harbour office had asked for a compass rose and she had given him a watchful thing that looked, under the lamp, like it was reading the till.

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She had drawn the hands herself, which was the only way she knew to get the fingers honest. She propped her own left hand on the drawing board, traced the knuckle lines in pencil, then stippled the heart at the bottom with a nib so fine her wrist ached by eleven. The key and the dagger she'd done in one sitting, while the kettle boiled dry and she forgot it on the ring. Cass who ran the shop downstairs kept asking when the new flash would go up in the window, and she kept saying when it's right.

On Friday the laurel branch on the third hand came back from the printer with its leaves reversed, climbing the wrong way round the wrist, and she laughed out loud in the empty room. Nothing about it was wrong, exactly. Anyone who chose it would wear it the way it was drawn, and nobody would ever know it had started as a mirror.

She pinned the sheet by the door anyway, beside the Thursday tide table, and when the bell went at closing she watched a boy stop in front of it, tilt his head, and point at the crossed bones. 'That one,' he said. She didn't tell him about the mirror.