White ink ornamental filigree tattoo running from the wrist across the back of the hand, against a cream lace dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink filigree design on the hand

Hand · Colour · Photo

A hand and wrist are shown with an ornate, symmetrical filigree design in white ink on the skin, rising from the wrist over the back of the hand toward the fingers. The linework is fine and scrolling, with small dots at the lower end, and the white ink contrasts softly with the skin tone. The composition is close and soft, with the hand set against a cream lace garment.

Hand Filigree Ornament Scroll Dot Hand Wrist White ink

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern was pricked on card, not drawn, because Mrs Tallow said a drawn line wanders in a moving ship. We had been eleven days out of Plymouth, and the bobbins clicked against the cabin bulkhead every time she rolled. I sat with the card on my knee and the lamp swinging, following the holes with a needle the way my mother had taught me, one scroll at a time, until each scroll curled back on itself like a hand unclenching.

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The commission was a veil and a pair of cuffs for a bride in Madras, a woman none of us would ever meet. Mrs Tallow had given the cuffs paired loops, each turning in on a tight centre, and between the loops she wanted a line of small knots, dots of thread worked close as seed. 'Those are where the eye rests,' she said. 'The places a person touches without thinking.' I did not argue. I had been told the same about mourning brooches and about the buttons on my father's coat.

Off the Cape the sea went grey and flat for three days, and the thread would not hold its damp. I unpicked a whole scroll and began again. On the fourth morning the swell came back, the lamp swung, and I finished the last knot as the ship's bell struck eight. I counted the dots twice. There were seven, which was right, and one more I had not meant to make, a small flaw where the needle slipped.

When the cuffs went ashore in their tissue paper, nobody saw the flaw but me. I still have the card, with its pinholes, and when I hold it to the window the light comes through every one.