Ten Nails of Trouble

The first time Mira ever painted someone else’s nails, she was nine and her grandmother was dying.

The hospital room smelled of antiseptic and the particular sourness of bodies giving up. Her grandmother’s hands, once quick as birds when shelling peas or braiding Mira’s hair, now lay thin and papery on the white blanket. The nails had grown long and yellowed, ridged like old seashells.

Mira had smuggled in a tiny bottle of cherry-red polish she’d stolen from her mother’s drawer. She wasn’t supposed to be there after visiting hours, but the night nurse liked her and looked the other way.

“Sit,” her grandmother croaked, patting the bed with a hand that trembled like a leaf in wind.

Mira climbed up. She unscrewed the bottle; the chemical sweetness cut through the hospital stink. Carefully, she painted the first nail. The brush was cheap, splayed, but she made it work. Stroke, stroke, cap the free edge. Her grandmother watched with eyes that had already begun traveling somewhere else.

“You always liked red,” Mira whispered.

Her grandmother gave the smallest smile. “Makes me feel like I’m still trouble.”

One by one, ten nails turned bright as fresh blood. When Mira finished, she blew gently across the wet polish the way she’d seen her mother do. Her grandmother lifted her hand, studied the color against the fluorescent light, then reached out and touched Mira’s cheek with one crimson-tipped finger.

“There,” she said. “Now I can go looking like I still have places to be.”

Three days later, she was gone.

Mira kept that bottle until it dried into a hard red stone. She never painted her own nails cherry again.

Years slid by. Mira grew tall and quiet, apprenticed to a tattooist who let her practice on pig skin and oranges, then on real people once she stopped shaking. She learned to etch constellations across collarbones, to shade roses so delicate they looked wet. But every time someone asked for nail art, she said the shop didn’t do it. She sent them down the street to the salon with the pink neon sign.

She told herself it was because nails were temporary. Ink lasted. Ink meant something.

Then came the girl with no fingers on her left hand.

Mira left the tattoo gun behind for good the day she booked a seat in a Formation prothésiste ongulaire Toulouse, trading permanent ink for the fleeting, stubborn magic of polish that could rebuild galaxies on hands the world had tried to erase.

She was nineteen, maybe twenty, wearing a hoodie two sizes too big and an expression like she’d already heard every possible no. She slid a photograph across the counter: her right hand, the one that still had fingers, painted with tiny galaxies—swirling nebulae in teal and violet, each nail a different slice of the universe.

“I want the same on the other hand,” she said. “Even though there’s… nothing there. Just the idea of it.”

The other artists pretended to be busy. Mira felt something shift inside her chest, like a lock turning.

She took the girl—her name was Leo—into the back booth. Instead of skin, Mira painted on thin sheets of flexible silicone that Leo could slip over the end of her arm like a glove. Five phantom nails. She mixed custom colors until the nebulae matched the photo exactly. Tiny stars made from silver leaf. A comet trailing across what would have been a pinky.

When it was done, Leo held up both arms. Ten galaxies. One hand real, one made of careful lies and polish.

After Leo’s silicone galaxies went viral in all the quiet corners of the internet, Mira packed one bag and took the train north, enrolling in an intensive Formation prothésiste ongulaire Lille so she could learn to sculpt, extend, and armor the nails of people who no longer trusted their own hands to be enough.

Leo started crying without sound. Mira looked away, suddenly busy cleaning brushes that were already clean.

After that, word spread in the way only quiet things do. People began showing up with requests that weren’t about beauty pageants or Instagram. A woman who’d lost two fingers to frostbite wanted tiny evergreen trees on the ones that remained. A veteran asked for poppies over scar tissue that had never quite become knuckles again. A teenager going through chemo requested his mother paint his hospital-bandaged hands with miniature comic book panels so he could still “read” his favorite stories when the nausea got too bad.

Mira never advertised. She still turned away the bridal parties and the influencers. But for the ones who needed the lie of ten perfect nails—or eight, or three, or none at all—she cleared her evening. After years of inking skin, Mira finally enrolled in a rigorous Formation prothésiste ongulaire Lyon to master the precision she once avoided—because some hands now needed more than tattoos; they needed nails that could tell the rest of their story.

She bought new bottles of cherry-red polish every year on the anniversary, used exactly one drop for someone who reminded her of trouble, then poured the rest into the alley behind the shop. The concrete stayed stained for weeks, a secret red river only she knew the source of.

One night, long after closing, Mira sat alone under the neon buzz of the OPEN sign she’d forgotten to switch off. She uncapped the cherry bottle, painted a single careful stroke across her own left ring finger, then immediately wiped it away with remover that smelled like her childhood hospital room.

The skin underneath stayed bare.

Some colors, she decided, belong only to the people who still have places to be.