Black and grey tribal-style tattoo with a banknote-like central motif covering the back of a hand and extending onto the wrist and forearm.

Tribal and banknote-style hand tattoo

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a hand and part of the forearm with a large black and grey tattoo. The design combines bold tribal-style bands with a central motif that has shaded, engraved detailing and what appears to be printed-style lettering. The shading is smooth and the composition wraps across the knuckles toward the wrist, with the figure filling most of the frame against a pale floor.

Hand Forearm Tribal pattern Hand Forearm Lettering

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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

The rain had been coming down on Peel Street Market since six, and by eleven the tarpaulins sagged over the stalls like wet sheets. I was packing brass plates into my cashbox when Tomasz came running up the aisle with a carrier bag held over his head, saying the inspector was two stalls down and he needed the plate back. He wanted it gone more than I did.

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My father cut lines into copper for a printer's workshop across the river for forty years. He taught me that every curl in a border is a lie told carefully, and that a face on paper only has to hold still for a second in a stranger's hand. He died before the workshop closed, and what he left me was a wooden box of plates and a habit of counting things in the dark.

Tomasz's brother had pressed sixty notes from that plate in a garage in Kent, and the notes had gone out through the market like damp through a wall. I took the plate from Tomasz under the awning and felt the old ridges under my thumb, the banded tribal scroll around the central face that my father had engraved for a job nobody remembered ordering. Then I understood that the whole sorry business was only ever lines, and lines can be unmade.

I dropped it in the gutter. The rain ran over the copper and lifted the ink from its grooves in thin green threads, then carried them off toward the drain. By morning the corner was lined with a faint sheen, like the bloom on an old penny, and the face the plate had carried was only water running toward the river. I kept the box. I did not keep the lines.