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I went to a talk last week that hasn’t quite left me. It’s been rattling around my head ever since, the way a good idea does when it’s looking for somewhere to land. And since it hasn’t landed yet, I thought I’d share it with you and see where it takes us.
The talk was in Swindon, given by the portrait artist Duncan Shoosmith. If you haven’t come across his work, I’d encourage you to look him up — he’s a seriously talented painter with a gift for capturing people as they really are, not just how they sit in a chair. He spoke about his process, the way he builds a portrait layer by layer, and I found myself completely absorbed. There’s something endlessly fascinating about watching someone explain how they see.
But the part that really caught my attention — the part I haven’t been able to stop thinking about — was when he talked about hands.
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Any artist will tell you that hands are notoriously difficult to draw. All those angles. All those creases. The way fingers taper and curl and never quite sit still.
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Duncan spoke about them with the kind of reverence you might reserve for a landscape or a dramatic sky. He described the challenge of getting them right — how a hand slightly too large or a finger slightly too stiff can throw an entire portrait off balance. But more than the technical challenge, what struck me was his conviction that hands carry as much character as a face. Perhaps more, because people don’t guard their hands the way they guard their expressions.
And that’s the thought that followed me home.
What Hands Give Away
As a writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how people reveal themselves. Dialogue is the obvious place — what characters say and, more importantly, what they don’t. Body language comes in close behind. But hands? Hands are something else entirely. They’re a kind of unconscious autobiography.
Think about what a pair of hands can tell you about a stranger before they’ve said a single word.
Bitten-down nails might speak of anxiety, or impatience, or a restless mind with nowhere to go. Ink stains on the fingers could mean a journalist, an artist, someone who still writes longhand in notebooks. Rough, calloused palms suggest a life spent outdoors or in a workshop — a gardener, a carpenter, someone who builds things rather than talks about them. And then there are those immaculate, carefully manicured hands with not a cuticle out of place, which can tell you something about a person’s need for control, for order, for surfaces that say everything is fine here, nothing to see.
A wedding ring on a chain around someone’s neck rather than on their finger. Paint under the thumbnails that never quite scrubs away. A hand that shakes when it reaches for a glass. A hand that doesn’t shake when it should.
As readers, we pick up on these things instinctively. They feel real because they are real — we all read hands in daily life, even if we don’t realise we’re doing it. We notice the firm handshake and the limp one. We register the hand that hovers near a pocket, the one that grips a handbag strap too tightly, the one that rests easily on a table with nothing to hide.
The Writer’s Close-Up
In cosy crime — where the pleasure lies in the noticing, in piecing things together before the big reveal — hands are an absolute gift. A character who wrings their hands in one scene and clenches them in the next is telling you something long before they open their mouth. Are they nervous? Guilty? Trying very hard to hold themselves together? The reader gets to decide, and that’s part of the fun.
I love writing those small, telling moments. The suspect who drums their fingers on the table during questioning — not because they’re anxious, but because they’re bored. The witness who smooths their skirt over and over, as though the fabric might keep everything neat and tidy if they just press hard enough. The person who reaches out to touch someone’s arm and then pulls back at the last moment, the gesture aborted before it quite arrives.
And I especially love what hands can reveal about relationships. The way two people hold hands speaks volumes — fingers loosely linked and swinging, or white-knuckled and tight, or barely touching at all. And if someone doesn’t take the hand that’s offered to them? Well. Now you’ve got a scene.
Portraits and Pages
What I took away from Duncan Shoosmith’s talk — apart from a deep admiration for anyone who can draw a convincing thumb — is a reminder that the best details are the quiet ones. A portrait isn’t just a face. A character isn’t just dialogue. A mystery isn’t just a body in the library (though I do enjoy a good body in a library).
The richness is in the periphery. The story lives in the details that most people overlook — and hands, it turns out, are full of stories. They carry a person’s history, their habits, their secrets. A painter captures that on canvas. A writer tries to capture it on the page.
So here’s my challenge to you, whether you’re a writer or a reader or simply someone who enjoys a good puzzle: the next time you’re sitting across from someone — in a café, on a train, at a dinner party — have a look at their hands. What story do they tell? What do you notice that you might have missed?
You might find there’s a character in there somewhere, waiting to be written.
And if the hands in question happen to be clutching a Norfolk Terrier, a teacup, and a suspiciously underlined train timetable all at once — well, that’s probably just Paige.
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