Small black three-dot tattoo on the side of a finger, beside thin gold rings and mint green nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three dots tattoo on a finger

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand held up towards the camera, showing three tiny black dots tattooed on the side of one finger between the knuckles. The dots are arranged in a small cluster and are solid and evenly sized, with no surrounding linework. The hand has mint green nail polish and two thin gold rings, and the soft pink and white fabric in the background is out of focus.

Dotwork Hand Dot Finger Hand

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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 fourth step, it's gone soft where the rain got in, and sit where I can see your face, because I tell this one slow and I like to watch it land. You'll not have heard of Mabel Horne or her brother Tom, and that's no bother, since the orchard at Lower Pennick has forgotten them too, bar the three old Blenheims at the bottom wall.

Keep reading

Tom grafted those three the spring the war ended, before he went down to the coast for a boat that never brought him back. Mabel kept the orchard alone after that. Every late August she walked the rows with a tin bucket and a pencil stub, and for each apple that had split and dropped in the grass she made a small dot in the margin of the ledger. Three trees, so three dots at a time, pressed hard so they'd last. She told the vicar it was for the cider tally. It wasn't. It was the count of how many seasons she'd gone on waiting, and she meant to be able to read it back.

The ledger ran to forty pages. Then one August, under the wall where nobody had planted anything, she found a sapling with a single green apple on it, no bigger than a walnut. She stood there with the bucket going heavy in her hand and didn't write anything for a long while. Then she set the bucket down, left the apple on its bough, and turned to a clean line at the back of the book.

She never made another dot. Some say she went to the coast herself in the end, some say she stayed and grew old among the Blenheims, but the ledger was found in the scullery after, and the last entry is only a single neat line across the page, with nothing in the margin at all.