Black and grey photo of a hand holding scissors through the handles, with a small black looped symbol tattooed on the side of the finger.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small symbol tattoo on a finger

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey photograph of a hand with the middle and index fingers threaded through the handles of silver scissors. A small black tattoo of a stylised looped symbol with curled strokes sits on the side of the finger below the knuckle. The background is a plain pale backdrop, and the image is shot close up with the tattoo in the centre-right of the frame.

Hand Scissors Hand Finger Symbol Ornamental Loop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hairdresser in Marrow Cove had one rule for her apprentices: the scissors go on the finger, never in the palm, because a palm forgets what it holds. Old Bettany Reeve had broken that rule for forty years and called it cleverness. So when the boarding house on the headland sent word that the upstairs guests wanted their hair cut before the funeral, it was Bettany's apprentice, a girl called Orla Penhallow, who was sent up the cliff path with the good shears in her bag.

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The house was cold and smelled of salt and lamp oil. The guests were two sisters who did not speak to each other, and a grandmother who sat by the window counting gulls. Orla worked quietly. She slid the shears over her index and middle fingers, the blades opening like a heron's beak, and the hair came away in soft grey coils that she gathered into a tin for burning. The grandmother watched the loops of her small silver ring turn and turn as the blades closed.

When the work was done the grandmother pressed a coin into Orla's hand and said, "Your mistress taught you to thread the knot, did she?" Orla looked down at the faded looping mark below her knuckle, the one Bettany had inked there with a needle and soot the winter she was taken on. "She did," Orla said. "It keeps the blades from walking."

"It keeps everything from walking," the old woman said, and went back to her gulls. Orla walked the cliff path home with the tin under her arm and the coin warm in her fist, and she did not once let the shears rest in her palm.