Two hands clasped, one skeletal, in black line
Black and grey · Flash
A black ink line drawing shows a living hand holding a skeletal hand, with the finger bones drawn as separate segments. The linework is a bold, even outline with solid black fills at the joints and shadowed areas, and there is no colour. The pale grey background fills the frame, with the two hands arranged diagonally across the centre.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The ferryman's daughter had been holding her grandmother's hand for three days, which was how long it took the tide to turn over the mudflats of Harrowmere. Nobody on the quay said anything about it. The old woman's fingers had gone thin as driftwood, and when the bones began to show through, Ysolde simply laced her own through them and kept walking the shingle with her.
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The skeleton did not mind the cold. It had long since stopped minding anything, and it walked with a steady, clicking patience, each finger a little chain of pale segments that clasped and unclasped as it pleased. Ysolde had asked once whether it hurt to be held like that, bone against warm flesh, and the old woman had laughed, a sound like a gate on a rusted hinge, and said that hurting was for people who expected to keep things.
On the third evening the boat was ready, tarred and waiting at the end of the jetty with its lantern lit. Ysolde unlaced her hand one finger at a time, the way you would unpick a knot in a net. She stood on the wet boards and watched the skeletal hand close around the gunwale, then the sleeve, then the dark. The lantern swung once and went out.
She found the coin the next morning, pressed into the cold sand where the bones had walked, and she never told anyone that it was warm.
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