Black line drawing of two solid black hands reaching up out of concentric ripples, shown as a flash design on a white background.

Two hands rising from ripples

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows two solid black hands with flame-like, tapering fingers rising from the centre of two outlined pools of concentric ripples. The outline of the ripple shapes is drawn in fine, even black linework, while the hands are filled in solid black with no shading. The image is black and white on a plain white background, with the two pools set diagonally across the frame.

Hand Water Outline Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind your boots on the boards, they're sodden from the tank. Sit where you can see the water. Every night for forty years the Halliwell Travelling Wonder ended with the same trick: Ada Crane went down into the black tank under the big top, and two hands came up through the ripples to take the lantern from her. Nobody saw the hands but the front rows, and the front rows always swore they were fire.

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That last autumn at Ashby Common the canvas was patched in six colours and the ponies had gone to the knacker. Silas Crane, her brother, kept the lamps lit and his mouth shut about the money. Ada was failing. Her chest rattled like a loose shutter. One wet night she told him she would go down the tank one more time, and he should count her out loud, because the hands needed a count to know when to let go.

He counted. Ninety, a hundred and ten. At a hundred and forty the ripples settled and stayed flat, and Silas understood that whatever lay under the water had been waiting for a tally of its own. He reached in to the elbow, found cold fingers twisting like candle smoke, and held on. What came up was only his sister's lantern, still burning, and a single wet footprint on the boards that the rain never washed away.

So when the show packs up and the lights go out, you'll hear the tank ripple on its own. Don't count. Nobody's ever managed to stop at the right number.