Black ink tattoos on a seated person's forearm, calf and ankle, including a praying hands design, thin lines and small script, against dark volcanic rock.

Small black tattoos on legs and feet

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Bare arms, legs and feet of a seated person, with several small black tattoos. A praying hands design sits on the lower leg, thin lines wrap the wrist, and a hand motif is inked on the top of the foot, with small script near the wrist. The linework is simple and the composition is a close, overhead view with the limbs crossed over dark rock.

Forearm Calf Ankle Praying hands Hand Script Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Past the last black wall at Hrafnhol, where the lava runs down to the sea like poured tar, the old women said the border was not a line but a promise. Two sisters, Ysolde and Brenna, lived on opposite sides of it. They had quarrelled over a goat, then over a well, then over nothing at all, and for seven winters they had not spoken.

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Each spring a stonemason walked the border with a chisel and cut a small mark into the rock where the two villages met. He carved a pair of praying hands on the western stone and an open palm on the eastern one, so that travellers would know which way was which. Nobody in either village could remember who had first asked him to do it.

In the eighth spring Brenna crossed the lava at dusk with a bag of salt and found Ysolde already waiting by the praying hands, her own palm pressed flat against the cold stone. Neither spoke. Brenna set down the salt. Ysolde took a thin cord from her wrist and tied it twice around Brenna's, the way their mother had bound them as girls to keep them from wandering.

They walked home together along the same side, and the stonemason, watching from the ridge, saw that the marks no longer needed to be read. The tide came in over the black rock and covered their footprints, but the hands on the stone stayed where they were.