Black ink line drawing of a skeletal hand making the rock horns gesture, shown as a tattoo flash design on a pale background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hand in rock horns gesture

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of a skeletal hand with the index and little fingers extended and the middle and ring fingers folded down. The bones are outlined in bold black linework with fine hatching on their shading, and the carpal bones at the wrist are drawn in more detail. The drawing is black and grey on a plain light background, with the hand centred and filling most of the frame.

Skeleton Hand Bone Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hand came to me in a shoebox from a clearance sale at a closed medical school in Leeds, its bones wrapped in newspaper from 1974 and the wire rusted through at the knuckles. My job was to string it again so the museum could put it in a glass case. I laid the phalanges out on green baize and sorted them by length, the way my father taught me to sort type.

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By the third evening I had it strung loosely, fingers curled as they'd been in the box. Then I tried to tighten the middle and ring wires and found they would not stay folded. I pressed them down and they sprang back up, while the index and little finger stood straight, as if they had been asked a question and were waiting for the answer. I gave up at midnight. Next morning the lad from the flat downstairs, who played bass in a band called Slow Tide, came up for his dad's drill. He saw the thing on my bench, laughed, and made the same shape with his own hand. His nan, he said, had called it the devil's salute. The bones on the baize made it exactly.

The curator rang and said to articulate it in neutral, the catalogue needed a plain hand. So I did. It went into the case with its fingers folded, looking like a man trying not to be noticed in a crowd. Visitors walked past it. The lad kept bringing his mates on Saturdays, and I'd watch them through the glass, each throwing up the horns in their own reflection over the bones.

On the last day of the exhibition I found the case unlocked and the hand lying on the baize with its two fingers up, wire snapped clean through. I did not restring it. I wrote on the card beneath it, anatomically correct if you squint, and left it that way.