Fine line black tattoo of two hands reaching towards each other on the upper arm, with a navy top and a light blue background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two reaching hands on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two hands reaching towards each other in a single continuous black outline, with the fingers simplified and no shading. It sits on the outer upper arm, just above the elbow, and is shown in close crop against a plain light blue wall. The ink is a crisp, thin line on light skin, and the composition places the design horizontally across the arm.

Fine line Upper arm Hand Outline Arm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Harrow had the tiller in one hand and a heel of bread in the other when the Lily Tern came round the bend below Stanwick Lock, and she was not going to be the one to give way. Her father had taught her that a barge was a slow argument, and you won it by never stopping.

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Across the water, on the lock-side path, stood the Pell girl with a bucket of coal dust and nothing to do with her hands. Every summer the families passed each other like this, one boat up, one boat down, and every summer neither spoke. The river was too wide to shout across and too proud to be bridged.

Then the lock gates groaned, the water dropped, and the two boats sank level with the stone wall between them. Mags leaned out over the coping and stretched her arm. The Pell girl did the same. Their fingers came within a finger's width of each other, and the river held its breath, and nobody on either boat could say afterwards who had moved first.

Folk who drink at the Stanwick Arms say the hands never quite touched, and that is why the barges still sound their horns at that bend. Mags always said the closeness was the point. She kept a drawing of the two hands pinned above the tiller, one unbroken line of pencil, so she would remember how little distance there had been to cross.