Black dotwork tattoo of two outstretched hands on the inner forearms of a person with long dark hair, one hand reaching down and one reaching across.

Two reaching hands on inner forearms

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows a person with long dark hair leaning forward, arms extended towards the camera. Two hands are tattooed on the inner forearms, one on each arm, with fingers outstretched as if reaching towards each other. The hands are built from fine dots and stippled shading with defined outlines, giving soft, graded tone. The ink is entirely black and grey, set against pale skin and a white shirt, with a thin silver chain at one wrist.

Dotwork Realism Forearm Hand Pair Hair Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scaffold creaks whenever you breathe too deeply, so you learn to hold your breath while you stipple. Brother Tobias has warned you about the damp. He hasn't warned you about the hand. It sits on the north wall of the chapel of St Oda, above the choir, a lower hand reaching up out of a grey patch where the plaster has crumbled back to the brick.

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For three weeks you work on the upper hand, the one the abbey's ledgers call the Creator's, matching its shadows with a fine nib and a pot of lamp black mixed with rabbit-skin glue. You learn the painter's habit of dotting rather than hatching, a dusting of points that bloom into shadow when you step back to the nave. Every evening Tobias lights a candle at the foot of the ladder and asks what you have found. Nothing, you tell him, though your thumb has begun to ache.

On the last Thursday a flake of plaster falls and reveals a second hand beneath the first, smaller, its knuckles sharper, its fingers turned towards the wall as if reaching through it. Beneath it someone has scratched a name you can barely read: Gerard, lay brother, who held the ladder. Tobias says the old prior allowed it, because a man who holds the ladder should be allowed to touch the ceiling once.

You take your nib to the gap between the fingertips, no wider than a grain of rice. The brief says to close it. Instead you sit back on the planks with the candle guttering below, and you leave the space open. Some reaching is meant to stay unfinished.