One Sunday afternoon last summer, Kirsten Chen and her friend Roxy Soria sat on a stoop in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, chain-smoking and blasting male acquaintances with a request via text message: Send hand pics.

Chen is part of a growing group of people with a thing for hands. She particularly loves a big, strong hand with clean nails, because it suggests that the man attached to it is capable of taking care of her. “Hands are just so connected to acts of service,” she says. (The man she’s currently seeing has what she describes as attractive, service-oriented hands, and he uses them to carry her bags and hold doors open for her.) “Hands are always going to be the truth teller. A man cannot lie and say that he works on cars and then send me a photo of hands that are princess-perfect.”

There’s a thriving Reddit forum, r/manhands, dedicated to this new wave of thirst traps. On an almost hourly basis, a user will post a faceless photo with a suggestive caption pulled straight from romantasy-inspired role play. A recent post of a hand picking up a white king in a game of chess, for example, reads: Will you be ready if my next best move isn’t on the board? (The post was made by a verified user who watermarked the photo with their handle: u/Tis_Strange_But_True.) These hands are usually met with a barrage of positive, thirsty comments playing out the fantasy. Moderators are often flagging photos and threads as NSFW, even though nudity is not permitted on the forum. This new form of digital intimacy has turned a previously overlooked body part into a site of desire, potent with secrets.

Chen, a fashion and fetish consultant, started requesting hand pics after she found that straight men were growing reluctant to indulge her requests for more explicit images. (When asked why they might be turning down these entreaties, a handful of straight men I spoke to kept coming back to one succinct, very of-the-moment term: “surveillance culture.”)

That summer Sunday in the Upper West Side, Chen and Soria made the requests to the men without any instructions on how to pose their hands, whether to show one or both, etc. The guys were left to themselves to decide what made a good hand pic, and the results, understandably, varied. It was understood by the majority of submitters that the preferred image was of the top of the hand, taken from above, with the fingers spread but not splayed. Some sent an image of their palm or a side profile of their hand; others experimented. “A couple of people had their hands a little curled or holding something, which was fun,” Chen says. Because Chen and Soria both work in fashion (Soria is a stylist, as well as a self-proclaimed hand fetishist), more than a few of the submissions had a hypebeast edge. “Chrome Hearts jewelry, nice watches or Hermès bracelets” made several appearances, says Chen, and some of the hands were resting on Rick Owens pants or perfectly distressed, rare vintage Carhartts.

“It was very performative,” Soria recalls. “There was one guy who was a writer,” says Chen. “He sent me a photo with the edge of his finger on the spine of a book.” (It was Morning and Evening, an obscure Norwegian novella by author Jon Fosse.) “There was a furniture guy who put his hand out so that I could see the designer furniture in his living room.”

There’s no right way to take a hand pic, Chen and Soria say, because the viewers all have their own preferences. Chen prefers traditional brawn; her favorite subgenre is of hands on steering wheels. “I love the idea that they risked their life to take a hand photo while driving,” she jokes. More seriously, she says she loves it when a man places his hand on her thigh while driving. Soria, a gay man, doesn’t mind painted nails or small hands, for example. “I think acrylic nails can be fab,” he says. He is particular about thumbs, though he can’t quite, well, put his finger on what makes a good one.

Some people may be insecure about the size of their hands, worried what it might suggest about their endowment elsewhere, but Soria and Chen insist that it’s about the other stories that they tell—how you take care of yourself (as evidenced by clean, unbitten nails for example) or what you do with them (indicated by gym callouses or scars from manual labor). You can’t change the hand you’re dealt, but you can play it well.

I put out my own non-specific request for hand pics on Instagram and, to my surprise, received dozens of revealing submissions. A former intern of mine sent a photo of the palm of his hand with the set of a photo shoot in the background, but it came across as spontaneous and not performative, and the unassuming positioning of his fingers (held closely together, like he was about to raise a question) was a reminder that he’s a polite young man. My photographer friend naturally sent a few options: his hand on a keyboard with selects from a recent photo shoot within view, his hand from the side, and his hand holding iced coffee.