Two handprints in grey ink on the side of a torso, with script lettering above and below them.

Two handprints with script names on the side

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two handprints tattooed on the side of a body, one above the other, rendered in grey and blue-grey ink with soft shading. Two lines of cursive script sit between and beneath the handprints, and the skin around them is shown in a close crop against a dark background. The black and grey palette and the lettering give the piece a simple, clean composition.

Lettering Ribs Hand Script Lettering Name

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clay on Harrow Skerry is grey as March water, and you have to work it with your heels as well as your hands before it will sit still. The ferry is late again, so the kiln stays cold and you sit on the step with a bucket of slip, listening for the engine past the headland. When the boat finally noses into the slipway, Nell comes up the ramp first, with Tamsin hanging off her jumper and a sheet of paper folded small in her fist.

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You press Nell's hand flat into the wet slab, fingers spread, and she shrieks at the cold of it. Tamsin wants hers in the middle, then wants it moved, then wants to be the one who writes. You let her hold the nail. She scratches the letters beside each print in capitals that slope downhill, and you turn the tile over and show her how to make the words read the right way round once they're fired.

The tiles come back from the kiln in October, dull as slate, the glaze pooled in the dips where the palms pressed hardest. Nell's print sits above Tamsin's, the lines of their fingers crossing like the rigging of two boats in harbour. The ferry takes the tiles across to the mainland for the girls' mother to hang in the hall. You keep the spare one on your windowsill, where the morning light comes through the gap in the shutters and lays two small hands across the stone.