Fine line tattoo of two short slanted strokes in dark ink on the side of a finger on the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two short lines on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand showing a small tattoo of two short, slightly diagonal parallel lines on the side of the middle finger. The linework is thin and solid, with no shading, and the ink is dark, close to black or deep purple. The composition is tightly framed on the hand, with partial tattoos visible at the edges on the other hand and wrist.

Fine line Hand Line Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody tells you that the blade is the easy part. Old Ruth showed me the lame at four in the morning, the razor held at a shallow angle, one clean stroke across the top of a proving boule so the crust would open like a mouth when the oven hit it. Two cuts was the house rule for a tin loaf, she said, one for the flour and one for the fire, and I thought she was being fanciful until I watched her do it without looking.

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The trouble with the blade is that it doesn't know when you're tired. In my first week I opened the side of my finger on the lame and bled into a tray of cob dough. Ruth scraped the whole batch into the bin without a word, then handed me a fresh bowl and a strip of plaster. I kept that plaster on for two days, and every time I scored after that I felt the small sting and thought of her hands, which never shook, not even at five when the van from the depot was already idling in the yard.

The morning she didn't come in, the shop smelt wrong. The ovens were lit and the bins were full, but nobody had turned the proving racks, and the sourdough had gone too far. I stood there with the lame in my hand and did what she'd taught me: two diagonal strokes, slow and sure. When the loaves came out of the oven, the scores had opened the way they should, pale gold lips split along the top.

I still score every loaf that way, two quick strokes, shallow and certain, and I haven't once needed to look at what I'm doing.