Close-up of a hand with orange nails showing a small fine line black tattoo of the female symbol on the side of the ring finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small female symbol on a ring finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand is shown palm down with fingers spread against a plain light grey background. A small black tattoo of the female (Venus) symbol, a circle with a cross beneath, sits on the side of the ring finger near its base. The thin, even linework is crisp and the ink is unshaded, with the warm skin tone and orange nail polish providing the only colour.

Fine line Hand Circle Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling since Tuesday, and by the third night the Drover's Rest had nothing left to burn but the settle. Mrs Acklam sat by the hearth with her hands folded over a copper warming pan that had lost its handle, turning it so the lamplight slid across the metal like water.

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"Your master's mark, that is," she said, when I leaned close to read the small stamped sign on its underside. A circle with a short cross beneath it, worn soft at the edges. "Jonah Pell used to say it was for copper, not for any goddess. Copper was the Venus metal, see, the old men at the foundry called it that. He had the punch made in Sheffield the year we married."

I had been an apprentice to a coppersmith in Leeds for four years, and I knew the sign well enough, but I had never heard it explained that way. I asked whether she still had the punch.

She did. It was wrapped in a stocking in the drawer of the bar, heavy as a plumb line, its face clean from years of disuse. She put it in my palm without ceremony. "Stamp what you like. The pan's done for. Mend it or don't."

I fixed the handle to the pan with three rivets from the box under the stairs, and before the light went I struck the Venus sign into the new copper beside the old one, so the two marks sat together like a pair of hands on one rail. In the morning the wind had dropped and the lane ran clear to the road. Mrs Acklam hung the pan above the door, shining, and did not thank me, which was how I knew she was pleased.