Black linework tattoo of two hands reaching towards each other, shaded with hatching, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two hands reaching on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework tattoo shows two hands reaching towards each other, one from above and one below, with the fingers partly overlapping. The outlines are even and the shading is built from fine parallel hatched lines on the knuckles, fingers and creases. The design is in black and grey only and sits centrally on a pale inner forearm against a blurred background of dry leaves.

Realism Forearm Hand Linework Hatching

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Osric had the scriptorium to himself the week the leaves came down, and I think that is why he let me watch him work on the hands. He was an old illuminator with knuckles like knotted rope, and he drew everything twice, first in lead and then in ink, so the second line would hide the first. A hand is only ever half of what it wants to say, he told me, shading the crease of a finger with strokes that ran parallel as rain on a window.

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The page in front of him was for the Abbot's psalter, and the margin had a space left empty that he would not explain. Each morning he worked on it a little more. Two hands, one descending from the top of the leaf and one rising from the bottom, their fingers just touching where the vellum had been scraped thin. He said the abbot wanted a blessing. He said the artist who had first drawn the margin was long dead and had been a better man than either of them.

On the last day of October the abbot came down the cloister steps and found the psalter open on the lectern. Osric was gone. His ink pot stood uncapped beside a tray of lead points, and in the same faint grey he had added one more line: the lower hand had taken hold of the upper one by the wrist.

The abbot tried to scrape it away, but the vellum had been dampened and the lines held. I keep my own copy of the drawing folded in my sleeve, and when I cannot sleep I trace the knuckles with my thumb, counting the hatched lines the way he taught me, until I reach the place where one hand stops and the other begins.