Colour traditional tattoo of a red cigarette packet with a woman's portrait in an oval, held by a hand with long dark nails, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional cigarette packet held by a hand on a leg

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A bold red cigarette packet with a woman's portrait in an orange-edged oval, several cigarettes poking from the top, and a pale hand with long dark nails gripping its sides. Solid black outlines define the shapes, with simple shading on the hand and packet, and green and yellow accents. Partial tattoos of a skull at the top left and an eagle at the bottom left frame the main design against the skin.

Traditional Calf Cigarette Hand Skull Eagle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hand came through the door of the Golden Crown pawnshop at ten to four on a wet Tuesday, nails filed to black points, holding a red cigarette packet the way a card sharp holds the card he means to keep. Dolly Feeney knew the packet before she knew the hand. Everyone on Cable Street knew that packet. Behind the gold-edged oval on its front was the face of Nancy Ryle, who had married the wrong Doyle brother in 1952 and never forgiven the photographer for making her look so pleased about it.

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The hand set the packet on the glass counter between a tin of toy tractors and a pair of brass knuckledusters. It tapped the foil three times, then slid it an inch closer. Dolly counted the cigarettes poking from the top: three, their papers creased like old envelopes. In thirty years she had seen plenty come across that counter, but never a pledge that wanted redeeming.

'What's it against?' she asked.

The hand said nothing. It turned the packet so the four asterisks faced her, and Dolly understood she was being asked for a figure.

She opened the lid. Under the cigarettes lay a folded ticket in pencil: 'Held against one Doyle, one night, one promise. Redeemable when the last one is lit.' Dolly read it twice, then took a shilling from the drawer and set it beside the tractors. The hand ignored the coin. It waited until she struck the brass lighter from her apron and lit the middle cigarette herself, and only then did the nails lift from the packet.

The smoke drifted towards the rain-streaked window, and in the glass a woman's reflection looked back at Dolly with a rueful expression. The hand was already gone. Dolly shut the lid, wrote Nancy's name in the book, and set the packet on the shelf above the tractors, where it would stay for as long as there were Doyles left to owe.