Black and grey dotwork tattoo of two skeleton hands reaching towards each other above the sternum, with a wishbone shape between them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Skeleton hands framing a wishbone on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

Two skeleton hands with curled fingers rise from the lower edges of the image and meet at the centre, where a wishbone-like shape sits above the breastbone. The bones are outlined in bold black lines and shaded with dense stippled dots, giving them a three-dimensional look. The tattoo is in black and grey only and is centred on bare skin, with the top corners showing a person holding up a shirt.

Dotwork Chest Skeleton hand Hand Bone

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Hallan they still split the wishbone after Sunday dinner, but nobody had pulled one properly since the Carrick boys went out in March. Old Ishbel kept the bone on the windowsill in a saucer of salt, because a wish left lying in a house with an empty boat in the harbour will go looking for the wrong hands.

Keep reading

Her granddaughter Kirsty was nine and had no patience for salt. She took the bone down before the kettle was warm and carried it to the tideline, where the sea was drawing the shingle back in long grey sighs. Hold one end, she told the water, and I will hold the other, and you can bring my father home from the Skerry. The sea kept its counsel. But something came up the beach through the wrack: two hands of bone, pale and clicking, fingers curled like a man reaching for a rope.

They climbed the shingle to where she stood and took hold of the wishbone at its two forks, one hand each, the way a child holds a sledge. Kirsty pulled. The bone did not break. Its wishing ran back down the beach and into the cold water, and the hands were slow to let go, and she understood, standing there with salt on her shins, that the sea had not sent them for her father at all.

He came in on the evening tide, rowing alone with one oar and a face like paper. He had been three nights on the Skerry with nothing to eat but limpets. He asked who had been pulling at the bone on the sand. Kirsty told him nobody. That night she put the bone back in the saucer, and Ishbel, listening from the stair, said nothing at all, which on Hallan is how the old women say they agree.