Black dotwork mandala armband tattoo on an upper arm, with dotted lines, a solid band and a teardrop motif below.

Black mandala armband tattoo on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white vest top stands with one hand resting across her body, showing a black mandala armband tattoo on the upper arm. The design combines rows of fine dots and beads, a solid black band, and a semicircular mandala filled with scrolls, petals and teardrops, ending in a small diamond. The tattoo is shown in black ink against plain skin, with a pale wall behind.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Mandala Armband Dot Teardrop Band Scroll Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-maker's girl had been told three times not to go up the Weir Stairs after the bell, but the river had risen two feet since supper and somebody had to carry the spare lanterns down to the ferry men before the fog came in off the marsh.

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Abel Quill had cut the glass for those lanterns himself, the winter his wife died, and he had cut every one the same: a half-circle of petals and scrolls with a row of beads along the top, a black band of lead to hold it steady, and at the bottom a single diamond where the light was meant to gather. Maud knew the old saying that the diamond was the place a boat should aim for. Nobody in Hollin Reach had ever tested it, because nobody went out on the water in fog.

She lit the first lantern on the top step and the light came through the glass in a ring of dots across the stones. The beads threw small bright coins onto the wet wall, the scrolls threw curls, and the diamond threw one hard point out over the black water, pointing at the weir. Below, a ferryman called out, then another, and she realised they had been drifting toward the broken piles all evening, steering by the dark in the middle of the river.

She ran the lanterns down one by one and set each on a rail, so the diamonds faced the same way. By midnight the fog had thickened into wool, but the ferries came in along the path of light, slow and steady, and nobody touched the piles. When Abel came down at dawn, soaked to the knee, he picked up the last lantern, turned it over in his hands, and said nothing at all, which Maud understood to be the highest praise a glassman could give.