Black and grey fine line tattoos of dots, dashes and simple symbols across the fingers of a hand, shown in a black and white photograph.

Small dot and dash marks across fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with curled fingers shows small tattoos made of dots, short dashes, a cross, a chevron and vertical lines, one mark per finger segment. The linework is thin and crisp with solid black ink and no shading, set against a plain light background. The photo is black and white, with the hand framed at an angle that shows the palm side of the fingers.

Fine line Dotwork Hand Dot Dashes Cross Chevron Line Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp on Skerrow point had been dark since the gale took its glass, so the women carried tallow up to the headland instead. Morag Pell kept the signals in her head rather than on paper, because the men at sea could not read paper in the rain.

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A dot was a short flash and a dash was a long one. A cross meant come home before the dark. A chevron meant the herring were thick under the north shoal and the bows should turn toward it. Three upright strokes meant weather was coming in from the west, and nobody should be proud about it. Morag taught these to every girl who climbed the path, and every girl swore she would never need them.

The autumn the Cormorant failed to return, a light came back across the water on the turn of the tide. Short, short, long. Then a pause, and a flash that was the cross. Morag's granddaughter Isla stood at the rail with the tallow guttering and felt her hands go cold. The cross was the signal for come home, and it was being sent from the one place in the bay where no boat could be, the reef that breaks at low water.

Isla answered with a chevron and three upright strokes, and she kept answering until the grey came up over the reef. When the Cormorant finally rounded the point, her crew were thin and quiet, and none of them spoke of the voice that had called them in. Later, Isla found Morag's pencil marks scratched inside the lid of the tallow tin, a row of dots and dashes she could not read, and beside them a single cross, pressed hard enough to tear the tin.