Two hands with traditional style tattoos on the backs and fingers, showing a crowned Jesus figure on one hand and a SERVANT HEART banner on the other, with letters across the fingers.

Traditional hand tattoos with Jesus and lettering

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

The back of one hand shows a shaded portrait of a bearded man wearing a crown of thorns, with green foliage at the top. The other hand has a ribbon banner reading SERVANT HEART above a red and green design, and bold black block lettering runs across the fingers of both hands. The bold outlines and flat colour fills of traditional style sit against a dark, plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry was already pulling away from the shingle when Crake came down the slipway with his sleeves rolled and his knuckles raw from the cold. Ada had her needles laid out on an oilskin on the bow seat, the old machine humming off the battery she charged from the wind turbine on the sea wall. 'Not on the palm,' she said. 'Nobody reads a palm in the dark, and you'll want to be seen.'

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He had brought a torn prayer card from the drowned chapel at Heron Reach, the one with the thorned man whose face had gone soft from years in a damp pocket. Ada copied the face onto the back of his hand in blue and rust, and above it she inked a ribbon with the words SERVANT and HEART, which she said was the only honest thing a ferryman could ask for. Across the fingers she set the letters one to a knuckle, so that when he clasped his hands together the sentence would run across both: ONLY, WILL, LOVE, SAVE.

His brother Sam had been on the far bank when the tide turned, and nobody had been able to row out for him. Crake had gone alone the next morning and come back with an empty boat and a face like wet slate. 'Will it keep anyone afloat?' he asked. Ada wiped the skin clean and didn't look up. 'It keeps your hands busy,' she said. 'That's most of what a hand is for.'

By dawn the fog had lifted off the channel. Crake stood at the tiller with both fists resting on the wooden rail, the thorned face turned out toward the water, and the letters caught the first grey light as he steered for the hill where the lamps of the new chapel were burning. Somewhere behind him a boat bumped the pontoon, and he did not turn around until he heard a voice call out that it was only the wind.

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