How to indicate the user where to tap without annoying him

Question

I'm sure you all know "the Knife Game". You have to place your one hand on the desk and, using the other hand and a knife, tap the spaces between the fingers as quick as possible using a knife (or your finger in my digital version).

If also want to include a leaderboard in the game featuring the following data:

• Name of player
• Date
• Time the player played
• Number of taps

I use a silhouette of a person as an icon for the first one, a calendar as an icon for the date and a stopwatch of the time played.

But I don't know how to create an icon for the number of taps. This is what I already tried:

• Four vertical lines crossed by a horizontal line. As this is an old way of counting and the game is western-themed, this works quite nice and looks good. If is not clear what is counted, though.
• A knife in the table: addressees the issue of above, but it is not clear that it is a count. I could add a "times" appendix to the number following the icons to make that clear.
• The two icons from above combined. Will be pretty unreadable because of the icon's small size: given 1080p-resolutions, the icons have a size of about 60x60 pixels.

That's what I came up with, but, as you can see, I'm not happy with any of these. If you need more detailed information about the game:

• Western themed: a lot of wood, text is in red, but not completely saturated
• Target platform: currently Windows RT, mainly 7' - 10' tablets (I need to change the icon size for phones or the icons will be completely unreadable)
• Comic style: no gradients or textures, just solid colors with some simple shading (the darker parts are covered by a black polygon with some transparency)

Answer 1

Sorry I don't have the time to do an in depth answer, but why don't you go with something like this?

And change the number depending on the amount of taps needed

Answer 2

You could use a fingerprint something like this:

Answer 3

A knife sticking in the table would be ideal because as soon as there is one entry on the leaderboard your users will intuitively understand that the number underneath the icon must be the number of taps on the screen.

Answer 4

Either of the icons you suggested will work; it sounds like the problem is that users might not immediately associate the icon with their score. You can fix that by putting the icon in the game's UI, next to the score as the users are earning points. That way by the time they arrive at the scoreboard, they've already associated your chosen icon with their score.