Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a skeleton hand forming a V sign on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hand making a V sign

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A skeleton hand with two fingers raised in a V shape is tattooed on the forearm, with the bones drawn in detailed outline and shading. The linework is combined with fine stippled dotwork that builds the shadows and bone texture. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills the centre of the frame against a blurred background.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Skeleton hand Bone Skeleton Peace sign Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot sends you down to the charnel vault on the Tuesday after Michaelmas, because Brother Anselm's knees have finally given up and somebody must lift the skulls out of the wet. You take the lantern, a stiff broom and a sack of lime. Nobody mentions the hand in the north alcove, the one set on a ledge above the oldest bones, its fingers spread in a V as if it has just finished an argument and won it.

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You try to sweep around it. The dust settles in its knuckles like grey snow. When you reach up to tip it from the ledge, the wrist does not come away, and you find yourself standing in the cold with your own hand raised to match it, two fingers apart, the way the carters greet each other on the Stroud road. Brother Anselm's tally book, when you fetch it at Compline, has a line for the north alcove: Leave the hand. Peace was agreed there, 1642. Nothing more.

You do not sleep well. In the morning you go back with a candle and a thin knife and work the lime loose from behind the wrist. Tucked into the gap is a folded strip of vellum, the ink gone the colour of weak tea: two names, one a miller, one a cellarer, and a debt of forty marks struck through with a single neat line. Below it someone has drawn two fingers, raised, as if to say the matter is closed and the bell may ring.

You fold the vellum back where it was. When you climb the stair the abbot is waiting at the top with two cups of ale. He nods at the lime on your sleeve and at your hand, which is still raised in that odd, settled V, and you find you cannot quite lower it. He passes you a cup. You take it with two fingers, the way a man takes a truce.