Two pairs of hands pressed together against a lavender wall, with white ink ornamental paisley designs on the backs of the hands, the fingers and the wrists.

White ink paisley designs on hands and wrists

Hand · Colour · Photo

Two hands are pressed palm to palm against a textured lavender wall, with white ink ornamental designs on the backs of the hands, two fingers and both wrists. The paisley motifs and lacy floral filigree are fine and detailed, with bands of geometric pattern running around the wrists. The white ink contrasts softly with the skin tone and the cool background, and the composition is centred on the hands.

Hand Forearm Paisley Floral Ornamental Filigree Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The apples came in so heavy this year that the Bramleys split on the branch before we could pick them, and Father has been muttering about the ladders since Tuesday. I am writing at the kitchen table with the window open and the wasps drunk on windfalls by the back step. Your mother's tin is on the dresser where you left it. I have not opened it. I did find the paper tucked inside the lid, your tracing from the summer before you went to London: the paisley teardrops with their little filigree blossoms spilling off the edges like lace left out in frost.

I took it to Mrs Ashdown at the post office, who used to embroider collars for the vicarage. She held it to the window and said the lines were too fine to cut in card, that you would need a steady nib and white ink, not the brown stuff. She pointed at the bands at the edge, the little diamonds stacked like tiles, and said they were a Kashmir shawl pattern her aunt had described, the kind that came over on ships and lived folded at the bottom of trunks for forty years. I told her you had drawn them from memory of a gift box. She did not believe me, and neither do I.

Yesterday I went up to the high orchard with the paper and a pot of Chinese white I found in the shed. I painted one teardrop on the bark of the old Russet where the moss is thickest, thinking the rain would wash it off by evening. It is still there this morning, pale against the grey, the blossom curling round a knot in the wood. Father saw it from the gate and said nothing, which from him is praise.

Come home for the picking. Bring your steady hand and the good nib. We will do the bands on the whitewashed wall of the packing shed, where nobody minds if it smudges.

Your loving sister, Ada