I've been trying to find this image's owner for days now. It doesn't exist on any of the booru sites and I cannot find any mention of an artist. Using a Chinese reverse image search engine I found this link which gave me the character and series. https://web.archive.org/web/20240610141547/https://wenwen.sogou.com/z/q524804726.htm (Not dead, just don't want to lose citation)

Also, this is the highest quality image available.

TinEye shows that the earliest instance of this image was on Feb 6, 2008. Though the file was unhelpfully named Animeboy-1.gif on some random blog.

I'm inclined to think this is a sketch by Kino no Tabi's official illustrator Kuroboshi Kouhaku based on the matching rendering of the eyes, the anatomy of the hands, and the general style.

luntoer said in comment #2632554:

Animeboy-1

Kinda funny. Oh how far we've come...