Small black swirl tattoo on the side of a finger, with a silver ring worn on the same hand against a dark brown background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small swirl tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with a small black tattoo on the side of one finger, showing a curled swirl or partial scroll design. The ink appears solid and simple, with no visible shading, and the image is in natural tones with no colour ink. A silver ring with an ornate scroll-like shape sits on the neighbouring finger, and the hand rests on a dark brown fabric.

Hand Swirl Curl Finger

Find an artist for this

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

The rain had got into the upright piano at Gull Terrace again, so Mrs Pennock sent the lodger up the stairs with a tin of linseed and a look that meant nobody would eat until the soundboard was dry. Tomas Adey had been at number nine since October, long enough to know the instrument was less a piano than a grudge. He worked in the back room with the shutters half closed, because the light off the harbour was too bright for a man trying to read grain.

Keep reading

The scroll lay on his bench that afternoon, a curl of sycamore no longer than his thumb. He had carved it three times. The first came out lopsided like a bent question mark, the second too fat at the eye, and the third he had kept, though he would not have said so. Mrs Pennock's granddaughter, Wren, sat on the windowsill with her chin on her knees and watched him work the gouge round the spiral. She wanted to know why a scroll had to keep going round before it could go anywhere.

"Because it's holding something in," he said, blowing dust from the eye. "Let the wood run straight and it splits."

She weighed this with the gravity of a nine-year-old who had been told many things were impossible. Then she asked whether he could make one small enough to wear, and he said he would try, and she went off to tell her gran that the lodger had promised a ring.

Three days later the piano sang, a little flat in the middle register, which Mrs Pennock declared a mercy. Tomas found the scroll in his coat pocket, polished and fixed to a band of worn silver he had beaten flat on the back step. It was too big for Wren and too small for anyone else, so he left it on the windowsill where she would find it, and went down to the kitchen to eat his dinner while it was still hot.