Close view of a woman with crossed hands showing traditional tattoos with dark outlines and red and orange colour on the back of both hands and wrists, plus small black symbols on the fingers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional hand tattoos with finger symbols

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

The image shows a woman in a checked flannel shirt with her hands crossed at her waist, with her head cropped out of the frame. Both hands and the lower forearms carry bold tattoos with heavy dark outlines and red, orange and green fill, centred on the back of each hand. Small black symbols are inked along several fingers, and the shirt's dark purple and black plaid fills the background.

Traditional Hand Forearm Symbol Finger tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Ottoline kept the sluice at Harrow Dyke for forty winters, and every autumn she painted the same grinning face on the gate boards before the flood water came up through the reeds. Two faces, she always said, one for each hand, so the water had something to look at that looked back.

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Her apprentice, a lad called Teodor Wick who had come up from the chalk pits with more questions than boots, asked why she inked small black marks along her own fingers each night by the stove. She showed him, one rune to a knuckle, each one a promise made to a particular ditch or culvert. Sluices are only iron, she told him. The water listens to hands.

The year the bank broke at Cold Lode, Nan was laid up with a fever and Teodor had to work the gate alone. He ran to her tin of ink in a hurry and copied the marks by lamplight, but his fingers shook and the lines smeared, and by the time the water was at his knees he could not remember which rune belonged to which ditch. He stood at the wood with the river pulling at his shins and simply laid his crossed hands flat on the boards, the grinning faces turned out towards the flood.

The gate held. In the morning the water had gone back down its own channels, and the reeds lay flat as sleepers. Nan, propped up in bed, asked him which marks he had used. Teodor looked at his smudged fingers and said he had not known, only that the river had wanted something to look at.