Black and grey traditional flash drawing of a skeleton hand holding a Tough Luck banner, with drips below and a spiked cuff at the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hand with Tough Luck banner

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A drawing of a skeletal hand in a loose ring gesture, with a banner reading TOUGH LUCK wrapped across the fingers. Three drips hang below the knuckles, and the wrist sits in a spiked cuff at the bottom. The bones are shaded with smooth grey tones and bold black outlines on white paper, with partial dark shapes visible at the left and bottom edges.

Traditional Skeleton hand Banner Drip Spike

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud, you will want to know why the ink on my hand reads like a bad debt, and the answer is Ferris Oakes, who sat across from me at the Lantern Dice House on Tuesday with a pair of ivory cubes he kept in a silver snuffbox. I had three sovereigns and a good feeling. By midnight I had a borrowed coat and a promissory note in my own handwriting, which I am told is a fine way to make a living if you have no interest in sleeping.

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Ferris did not lift a finger. He simply smiled and let the old clock above the bar do the cheating for him, the way clocks in this town always do. When the last bet was gone he took the hand I had been waving about, turned it palm down across the baize, and asked whether I wished to settle in coin or in kind. I said coin. He said I had none. So the tattooist on Cutler Lane now holds the rest of the debt, and he does not accept cash.

Here is the mercy in it, Maud. The fingers still work. I can lift the kettle and hold the pen, and I can still make the ring with thumb and forefinger that Ferris asked for when he laughed. Tough luck, he said, and tapped the ribbon of words he had painted across the knuckles, as if they were a receipt. I am keeping the receipt. Come Sunday and bring the good tea, and I will show you how the three drops fall whenever I lose my temper.