Callous placement, nail length, scars, sun damage, muscular development, missing digits… You can tell a lot about a person by looking at their hands, but how much of it is accurate?
Do your hands reflect your age? Your profession? Your hobbies? Your clumsiness?
Do you wish you’d worn sunscreen or gloves more often?
More my hobbies than my profession.
Currently, my hands have ground in oil and muck, various cuts, gouges and calluses and my lower arms are covered in scratches. The nails are ragged and have oily dirt under them.
If Sherlock Holmes were to examine my murdered corpse, he’d probably conclude I was a car mechanic or somesuch*. As it happens, he’d be wrong. I work in an office. I’m an accountant. 
I’ve recently been spending a lot of time working on cars, hence the state of my hands - in a couple of weeks they’ll be back to ‘normal’ - but even then I’ve probably got a few cuts and scratches, plus the calluses. As I work in an office, I like to spend my free time working with my hands and giving my brain a rest. As this sort of work tends to take more of a toll than office work, I have the hands of a manual labourer rather than an office worker.
ETA:
As for my age, I’m 40 but most people are surprised at that - they usually assume early to mid thirties. I take no real care of my skin, so I guess I’m just one of those naturally young looking people.
*Well, he’d probably manage to find some substance in my hair or something that only comes from a specific model of photocopier, and within five minutes have worked out what I did for a living and where I worked. But you get the idea…
I have vitiligo affecting the backs of both hands, and I am outdoors a lot. Even with SPF 70 sunscreen I get occasional burns. Other than that, they’re pretty unexciting.
(Back when it first manifested itself I had 3 or 5 occasions where total strangers would notice my white hands and say, “Hey! Do you have that thing Michael Jackson has?” I would glare at them and say, “Pedophilia? NO. Why?” I’ve matured considerably since then.)
My forearms and hands have scars so close together you can hardly tell they are scars. Most of my calous has disappeared since retirement but I still have callous from my woodworking hobbies. The top of my head is scarred with little nicks and scratches from years of crawling around inside trucks bodies and banging my head. As for muscle my forearms are pretty big, possibly from the handtools I have always used.
Mu hands have small, round scars on them that look like someone’s been putting cigars and cigarettes out on them for years.
Discoid eczema.
Also, my right hand some some weird, idiopathic swelling (IDIOpathic, 'cause the doctors don’t know what it is) in a couple of fingers.
Sigh. I used to have really pretty hands. 
I usually have long finger nails, nicely shaped and painted. When I was taking an “art” welding course, all were amazed that I could manage with such long nails. I have the nails trimmed down right now as I work in my woodshop every weekend in the summer and I’ve been known to use a finger nail as a screw driver. Otherwise, my hands are in good repair so-to-speak, but probably look right for my age, kinda wrinkly. I"m a 59 year-old woman.
I’m an administrator - so my day job is office based.
No. I actually have quite nice hands, long, tapered fingers and longer fingernails. They don’t look like they are used to carrying a weapon, or do CrossFit, but I wear gloves at the gym and try to take care of them. There are some scars, but they are faint, and since I am naturally ghosts-white, don’t show as much as if I had a tan.
I do have a writing callous though, since I write (now using a computer, but used to be longhand)
The knuckles on four fingers of my right hand are slightly scabbed over which might lead one to believe I’d been in a fight a week or so back. But since I’m a 54 year old woman, it’s actually just too much sun and heat last weekend giving me psoriatic flareups. Very attractive.
Ditto. I’m a white collar business worker in a fortune 100 company. But I have two project cars and a couple of motorcycles that I get greasy with most evenings and weekends. I kinda like that I sometimes have grease stains (that you can’t get out) under my fingernails, about 6 inches away from a nice pair of cufflinks. I like the juxtaposition. It’s who I am.
I have large, muscular hands that are deeply tanned. The tan accentuates the scars from burns, cuts from barbed wire, broken glass, sharp metal. A metatarsal, broken twice, elevates part of a fist. My nails are short but may betray the fact they’ve recently moved much soil, humus and been around internal combustion engines. Arthritis is starting to creep in after years of treating them rough with sports, the weather, etc. They look like they belong to someone who worked outside in manual labor all their life while in reality for the last 25 years I’ve been exploring for oil from a comfortable office workstation.
So they don’t reflect my profession very well but certainly do my hobbies, vacations and recreational activities.
I’d like to hear about the OP’s hands.
For myself, my hands are unremarkable considering I do garden work, yard work, car maintenance and repair, etc. The only thing of note is that the knuckles of my right hand are somewhat messed up due to hitting too many brick walls too many times when I was younger.
Yeah, I suppose they do tell the story, though you might need to know a little about me first to get it right.
There are usually signs like nicks and abrasions of all the gardening and household projects I do, but no permanent callouses or serious damage that you might expect from someone who does that work for a living. Sometimes I have tree sap or stubborn dirt that discolors the skin or gets under fingernails.
My hands are probably bigger and stronger looking than you’d expect from an accountant, but I am literally big-boned, and not just as a euphemism for fat. I’m the guy who usually has to special-order extra links for the wrist band on my watches, and my shoe size is double-wide.
For the most part I have smooth hands indicating my desk job. Ring on my finger indicates I’m married. Its distinctive but not overly ostentatious, suggesting possibly that I don’t entirely follow the crowd. The state of my nails indicate that I am not particularly vain or concerned about my appearance. The scratches on my arms indicate my close affiliation with either cats or thorn bushes. I have both and I’m not sure which ones made the current ones. I have a long scar on my right ring finger, which I favor slightly. I’m not sure what Holmes would make of that but its mostly a testament to my clumsiness.
My hands are pretty unremarkable. They’re soft with no noticeable scars, so a Sherlock Holmes might deduce that I’m some kind of office worker. These days, that would lead to the deduction that I spend a lot of time at a computer. Beyond that, there’s nothing to indicate that I write software, or that I also do repairs around the house and a little bit of gardening in my spare time.
Detective stories are great, but the type of deductions we see, with Holmes in particular, aren’t realistic. The subjects in those stories always conveniently have attributes related to their profession or station in life, and never have any contradictory signs, such as an office worker with scars from a childhood accident or some-such that might lead you to deduct physical labor.
Lifelong desk work, but a few callouses from golf, playing bass, and gardening. 3 scars on my LH from assorted clumsiness/stupidity.
Curious, looking at them my nondominant LH is quite a bit rougher than my right, other than a pretty decent callous on my right index finger. 2 of the scars on the LH are from careless use of a knife in my RH.
Even back on the farm in the carefree days of my youth and in the motorcycle shop when I was a mechanic, hand and foot care was always a BIG thing. So I can chop wood, hunt, fish, work in a shipping center and still have hands as smooth as you standard politician. And somehow I’m actually a little proud of that. A few scars here and there but not the rough mitts you would expect if you shadowed me for a week or two.
Yes – my station in life is such that I have plenty of time to needlecraft. So the ends of the first two fingers on the left hand are riddled with needle sticks. My thumb has a scar from the rather impressive rotary cutting accident from a couple of years ago.
And I still have scars from when I used to volunteer with a group that did home improvements – one from ripping up a floorboard and having it rip my finger.
My hands typically reflect only my most-recent escapades. If I’ve been playing the guitar, they are quick to toughen at the fingertips, if I’ve been working on a car or gardening, they get scraped and unwashably dirty around the nails, but they seem to recover without a trace. I don’t do the same things enough to have much lasting effect, so I guess they are the hands of a dilettante.
Short yet broken nails, covered in scratches and Kilz primer: yep, I’ve been remodeling my house.
I have several souvenir scars, too, most notably a circle around a knuckle caused by a vexing Italian bottle opener during my internship in Trento. Souvenirs fall apart but scars last forever.
I have arms like a fiddler crab.
You can tell that I am left handed, single, and don’t date much. And by much I mean at all.