Close view of a barber's tattooed hands holding a comb on a man's head, with a traditional skull on the knuckles and a coloured rose and dagger on the right hand.

Traditional hand tattoos while cutting hair

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A barber's hands rest on the back of a man's head while he holds a black comb. The left hand shows a black and grey skull with bold lettering across the knuckles and fingers, and the right hand carries a coloured rose and a dagger with bold outlines. The shot is shallow in focus, with a white collar and dark clothing in the foreground.

Traditional Hand Skull Rose Dagger Lettering Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barber came over the pass in the second week of snow, his shears wrapped in oilcloth and a black comb pushed through the band of his hat. Nobody in Coll had seen a man with letters across his knuckles before, and the children counted them aloud until their mothers called them in. He set up under the eaves of the inn and charged a coin a head, which the village paid gladly, because the last man had died in spring and the headman's boys had grown wild.

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The youngest would not sit still. He kicked the chair, swore at the cloth and bit the hand that tilted his head. The barber did not raise his voice. He held the comb between two fingers, the rose on his right hand red against the cold, and waited, the way a man waits for a dog to decide. When the boy finally sat, the barber worked for an hour, the dagger inked on his wrist turning as he drew the blade up through the hair at the nape. Nobody spoke. The snow kept falling on the shutters.

When it was done the headman paid in silver and asked what the trouble cost. The barber named a price nobody could meet: one winter's firewood for every house above the pass, carried down by the boy himself. The headman laughed, then stopped laughing, because the barber had already set the comb on the step and walked off into the white, the skull on his hand turned outward as if he had seen worse roads than this one.

In the morning the comb was still on the step, furred with frost. The boy took it up, looked at the teeth for a long time, and then went up the pass with an axe over his shoulder.