The Breton family gives Isolde of the White Hands a place of her own before she becomes Tristan's wife. Her father is Hoel, styled a king or duke in different accounts, and her brother Kahedin becomes Tristan's companion. The narrative moves between Brittany and Cornwall, the country of the woman Tristan cannot forget. In Gottfried von Strassburg's unfinished poem, the Breton princess draws his attention partly because she bears the familiar name Isolde. The unfinished German work should not be credited with the whole marriage and death sequence supplied by other texts.

Tristan's consent to marry does not free him from his earlier love. The Thomas tradition and Malory both describe a union that remains unconsummated, although their presentation and surrounding episodes differ. The bride receives the social place of a wife while her husband withholds the intimacy she expects. In the poetic branch, the hall of images gives further form to his attachment to the absent Irish queen and her companion Brangane. It is a striking contrast between the living woman in his household and the beloved preserved in memory and image.

The catastrophe in Thomas's surviving ending begins when Tristan is poisoned during a fight undertaken to help another knight, Tristan the Dwarf, recover his abducted beloved. The wound cannot be healed by the available doctors. Tristan sends Kahedin to bring Isolde of Ireland, whose healing skill offers his last hope. A ring identifies the messenger, and a sail provides a signal visible before the vessel reaches shore: white means the queen is coming, black that she is not. The White Hands overhears the arrangement and understands what the return will mean.

Kahedin succeeds in bringing the Irish Isolde, but the voyage is delayed and the wounded man weakens. His wife tells him that the approaching ship carries a black sail, although the signal is white. Believing that help and his beloved have not returned, Tristan dies. The Irish Isolde arrives and dies beside him. This ending concerns the deaths of the two lovers; it does not establish that the White Hands herself dies at the same moment. Her false report is decisive, but the poisoned wound, delay and divided marriage also belong to the tragedy.

Malory gives the Breton Isoud a different introduction: she heals an earlier wound before Tristan serves her father in war and marries her. Lancelot condemns the marriage as disloyal to the Irish queen, but that rebuke should not be turned into a permanent end to the knights' friendship. Nor should the white-and-black-sail ending be inserted into Malory's story. The White Hands has a reduced or altered role in other prose versions. Keeping these accounts distinct preserves both her importance and the variation in her portrayal, rather than making every author tell the same tale of a wife who lies.