Fine line black ink symbols including a crescent moon, stars and dots on the hands and wrists, in a fine line style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small symbol tattoos on hands and wrists

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Close view of two hands resting on the front of denim shorts, with a grey top above. Small black linework symbols, including a crescent moon, dots, sun-like rays, a stacked line motif and a few tiny shapes, sit across the knuckles, fingers and wrists. The ink is thin and even on a plain light grey background, with the subject centred in the frame.

Fine line Hand Forearm Moon Star Dot Sun Symbol Line Mushroom Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the crescent, Ottilie, that one means rain is coming, and the wrong sort of rain at that," Master Hesketh said, pressing the nib to the back of my hand as though it were parchment. The ink was cold from the stone pot. I had been apprenticed to the signwriters of Vell for three winters and my fingers still shook when he worked on them.

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Each mark was a word the city was not allowed to say aloud. The eye meant the tax clerk was watching. Three dots meant the bridge was out. Rays meant come before noon. A pair of stacked lines meant trust the bearer, who was never to be trusted in fact. Hesketh gave every royal messenger a small alphabet on the skin of their hands, so no guard who opened a pouch could read the letters inside.

The trouble came with Piet, a boy from the salt flats who could not keep still. He wanted a mushroom on his thumb because his mother grew them in the cellar. Hesketh refused, then relented, then drew it with a hand that trembled. That night the guards at the north gate read the mushroom as sell and waved the salt carts through untaxed. The whole kingdom laughed for a week, and the clerk who had been watching for the eye went red to the ears.

When the ink dried on my knuckles that evening, Hesketh took my wrist and added one more mark, a small circle with a dot inside it. Stay awake, it meant. Then he went back to his stool and let me sit with my hands folded, learning to say nothing with them.