Black and grey fine line tattoo of a violin on a finger, with a straight line on the neighbouring finger and a small sprig on the back of the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Violin and line tattoos on two fingers

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two fingers are shown close together in a black and white photograph. The finger on the right carries a fine line outline of a violin with a vertical bow-like stroke through its centre, and the left finger has a single straight vertical line. A small sprig of leaves is visible on the back of the other hand at the top left.

Fine line Hand Line Sprig Leaves Bow

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shift horn has gone quiet over Hollin Pit, and the terraces below it smell of wet coal and Sunday gravy. Your brother Tom is still in the lamp room, so it falls to you to carry the violin case up Gallows Row, the bow tucked under your arm like a splinter of ash. Nobody on the street expects you to play anything but hymns.

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Mrs Dunning kept a piano in her front room that nobody had tuned since the strike. She let you practise there on Tuesdays with the curtains open, so the men coming off the afternoon turn could hear the scales through the glass. Old Joe Carr would stop on the pavement with his bait tin, tap the sill twice, and walk on, which you understood to mean the A was flat.

The night the cage stuck at four hundred feet, you sat on the back step and drew the bow across the strings in the dark, very softly, holding one note until your wrist ached. Nothing came up from the shaft. Nothing needed to. Tom's voice came later, rough with dust, asking what the racket was, and you told him it was only a line of sound to keep the place awake.

In the morning the whole row was at the pithead. You stood at the back with the case against your shin and counted the men as they came out, one, two, eleven, and the twelfth was Tom, grinning, his teeth white in the black. You played the one note again, and it climbed over the headgear and hung there while the men stood still to listen.