Close-up of a hand with white ornamental lace-style designs on the fingers and back of the hand, set against grey fabric.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink lace-style design on a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand with white ornamental designs on the fingertips and across the back of the hand, in a lace-like pattern of scrolls, scallops and dots. The linework is fine and even, and the pale ink stands out clearly against the medium-skin tone. A grey fabric backdrop and a thin gold ring on the middle finger sit beside the design, and the image is framed with black bars at the top and bottom.

Hand Hand Lace pattern Mandala Scrollwork Finger Ring White ink

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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

Sit down, sit, the wind up here only listens to people who keep still. You want to know why Maren's sister never married the salt merchant? Then hush and listen to the pass, because the pass is where the lace came from.

Keep reading

Every winter the frost came down off the Kessel peaks and laid itself across the stones of Dun Ferrow in patterns no hand could copy. Scallops first, like the edge of a good shawl, then curls that ran out toward the fingertips of the rocks, and dots where the breath of the goats had frozen in the air. The old women said the frost was a weaver who had lost her thread and was hunting for it in other people's work. So they took up their needles and tried to answer her. Maren was the only one who got an answer back.

She climbed the pass in the dark of the first hard frost with a pot of goose-fat and soot and a feather no thicker than a hair. She did not paint the frost. She painted the mountain's hand, the one that held the valley, letting the pale line run from knuckle to fingertip the way the ice ran over the boulders. Each curl she laid down, the frost answered in kind by morning. Her sister, who had laughed at her, woke to find the whole edge of the byre roof written over in her handwriting.

The weaver came for Maren at midwinter. She wanted her thread back, and Maren had to give up the one she had spun into her own wrist, which is why the lace on the valley women is always pale, and always thins as spring comes on. Go on, the fire's low. Nobody in Dun Ferrow has ever worn the frost without paying for the lines.