Small black ornamental scroll tattoo wrapped around the base of a finger, shown on a hand with dark tipped nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small scroll band tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small ornamental tattoo of scrolling lines and loops sits in a band around the base of one finger. The linework is dark and fairly simple, with the design spanning only a narrow strip of skin. The photograph is taken close up in a dim setting, and the hand shows dark grey tips on the nails.

Hand Scroll Filigree Swirl Ornament

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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

Mind the fire, children, and let the old man have the good end of the bench. Out on the island of Scarrow there was a smith called Tobiah Wren who forged nothing but gates and hinges, and the iron he worked was always too cold to bend. One winter his wife, Ysolde, asked him for a band to close the gap between her ring and her knuckle, where the wedding silver kept slipping. He told her iron would not curl like a vine for any woman. She laughed and said she would wait.

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So he heated a length of black wire in the peat fire until it glowed the colour of a cockle shell, and he bent it with his teeth clenched, loop after loop, scroll inside scroll, the way the bracken unrolls in spring. It took him three nights. On the third, the wire cooled into a ring so fine it could be worn under a glove, and when Ysolde slid it on, the sea outside went quiet, as if somebody had lifted a hand from the water.

What the story does not say, because nobody on Scarrow ever admitted to it, is that the wire had been a gate hinge from the old chapel. Tobiah had taken it when the roof came down. Every hinge remembers the door it swung on, and that one was still looking for its way home. Ysolde wore the ring until she was buried, and they say that on still nights, if you hold your breath beside the harbour wall, you can hear a gate creak open somewhere under the tide.