Black and grey skeleton hand forming an OK sign in dotwork shading with bold black outlines, on a forearm beside partly visible colour tattoos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hand making OK sign on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A skeleton hand forming an OK sign with the thumb and index finger touching, drawn with bold black outlines. The bones are filled with stippled dotwork shading in black and grey, with lighter highlights left in the bone surfaces. Partial coloured tattoos in red and teal sit at the top of the frame, and the skeleton hand is centred on the forearm against a pale background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gull hit the wheelhouse glass at ten to six, and by six Uncle Ruairi had his good hand on the wheel and the bad one jammed in his coat pocket where the passengers couldn't see it shake. When the sea got ugly he did what he always did. He lifted his thumb and first finger into a ring and held it up to the window. Everything's fine. Nobody on Inish Carrig had believed him in forty years, but they always nodded back.

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He kept a skeleton hand in the biscuit tin in the bait shed, a real one from a medical school clearance on the mainland, wired at the knuckles and gone the colour of weak tea. When I was nine he took it out and made the sign with it, slow, the finger bones clicking together. The flesh lies, he said. It heals crooked and swears blind it's straight. Bone just tells you what it is.

The storm came in off the Sound with a wind that flattened the gulls, and a mooring rope snapped against the ramp. A crate of lambs went over the side, and the mate was down on the deck with his leg folded the wrong way. Ruairi couldn't shout over the gale, so he lifted the good hand from the spokes and made the ring at me, then tapped his own chest, then pointed at the lee of the pier. I understood it meant steady, bring her round slow. I brought her round slow.

Afterwards I put the tin back on its shelf in the bait shed and made the sign at the empty room, to see whether it still meant what he'd always said it meant. My thumb met my finger and held, the way his never quite had. It did, that night.

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