Black geometric tattoo of a mandala on the back of a hand and wrist, with crescent, ankh and arrow symbols on the fingers and a small sun motif on an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black mandala and symbol designs on hand and foot

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on sand with a dense black mandala design across the back of the hand and onto the wrist, and small symbols on the fingers, including a crescent moon, an ankh, arrows and zigzag lines. A small sun-like motif sits on the top of one ankle, next to a bare foot. The design appears to be henna or temporary ink, with flat black linework and no shading, and the photo is shot from above with an orange crocheted skirt in the lower frame.

Geometric Hand Ankle Mandala Crescent moon Ankh Sun Arrow Zigzag Symbol Feet

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the henna paste came over on the Fez boat late, so I have spent the week drawing on customers with a cold cone and not much patience. Your mother would have laughed at me. She always said the design should go on while the sun is still low, because the ink settles differently in that light and dries a shade darker by evening.

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Yesterday a girl off the ferry sat on the sea wall and asked for something that meant luck and also meant leaving. I didn't know what to give her, so I copied from your father's old almanac, the one with the crescent moon and the sun wheel and the ankh that looks like a key to a door nobody has built yet. I put arrows along the knuckles because she was catching the evening crossing, and zigzags because she said her heart jumped like that when she was nervous. The mandala I made up as I went, a flower opening over the wrist, its petals packed tight as lace.

She didn't pay. She pressed a coin with a hole in it into my palm and said the small sun on her ankle was a gift for whoever found her shoes. I watched her walk down to the quay with her sandals swinging from one finger, the paste already darkening at the edges of every line, and I thought of your father, who never once came back from the crossing with a story he could finish.

Come home at Easter if the boats run. I will have the kettle on and a new cone of paste, and I will draw you a crescent moon right here on the back of your hand, so you know which way the tide is turning.