Black blackwork design of a hand silhouette with a skull inside it and wispy tendrils, with the words WE KNOW beneath, drawn on a plain white background.

Skull within a hand silhouette with WE KNOW

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black hand silhouette contains a skull with hollow eye sockets and a jagged mouth. Wispy, ragged tendrils trail from the lower part of the hand and skull, and the words WE KNOW sit in plain capitals below. The design is in pure black ink on a white background, with the fingers and skull shapes defined by bold, smooth edges.

Blackwork Hand Skull Tendril Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Maud, Brother Anselm has not answered the bell for two days, so this morning I climbed the north stair myself with the lamp held low. The last time I carried it high, the draught took the flame and I stood in the dark counting my breaths like rosary beads. The hall is as we left it, roofless at the eastern end, nettles grown up through the flags where the high table stood.

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Above the chapel door, where the plaster has come away in a rough patch the size of a cartwheel, the damp has made its own picture. It is a hand, spread wide and black as a rook's wing, five fingers reaching down from the lintel, and in its palm a skull with an open jaw. Ragged threads of mould hang from the wrist and the bone like the hair of drowned women. Beneath it someone cut two words into the stone long before either of us came here: WE KNOW. The lettering is careful, the way a mason works when he is paid by the letter and resents every one.

Anselm's last entry, pinned to the refectory door, says only that he meant to measure the stain and wanted to see whether the fingers were as long as they looked. I found his measuring cord in the nettles, knotted at one end, the other end gone soft and dark as though it had been dipped in ink. I did not touch the wall. When I looked back from the doorway, the threads at the skull's jaw had shifted, all of them leaning towards the place where I stood.

I have written to the bishop's office, and I have written to you, because you always said I would be the one to go strange out here. Come when the roads dry. Bring salt. And if you find my own handprint on the chapel stone when you arrive, do not wash it off. I have tried, and the cold stays in the lines of my palm.

Yours, Edith