Black and grey realism tattoo of a skeletal hand with detailed bones, shown on the back of a hand held in a horns gesture against a black background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeletal hand tattoo on the back of a hand

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is raised in a horns gesture, with a realistic skeletal hand tattooed across the back of it and extending down towards the wrist. The bones, knuckles and finger joints are rendered with fine shading, soft highlights and dark shadows that give them a three-dimensional, x-ray look. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, set against a plain black background that makes the skin and ink stand out.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ansel Moorcroft was sent up the Lantern Stair at dusk because the bell-keeper of Sallowmere would not climb it himself. The keeper was seventy and proud of his knees, and the rope had frayed since the spring gales. Ansel carried a satchel of salt, a tin lamp and the ledger of the dead, which was how the kingdom counted the people it had lost to the marsh fever. Beside every name the old reckoner had drawn a set of bones, shaded so finely that they seemed to glow from inside the page before he went blind.

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At the top the bell hung still under a sheet of grey light. Someone had pressed a hand in soot against the stone, fingers spread, the index and little finger lifted. Ansel knew the sign from the fishwives who used it against the evil eye, and from the drummers in the hill towns who flashed it before a fight. In Sallowmere the old folk said two raised fingers let the dead see you clearly, so you could be recognised and let pass.

He sat beside the soot print and opened the ledger to its last page, where the reckoner had drawn a skeleton hand lifted in the same sign. The bones ran from knuckle to wrist as neatly as a fence, each joint lit on one side and dark on the other. Ansel studied it until the lamp guttered, then copied the shapes onto his own page in chalk, joint by joint, so the names below would have something to stand on.

He rang the bell once, for the drowned. Below, the marsh went on breathing its mist, and the ledger lay open on the stone with every name written and counted.

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