Back of a hand covered in a black blackwork mandala tattoo of swirls, stripes and dots, placed on the hand and fingers.

Black mandala design across the back of a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The back of a hand is covered in a symmetrical mandala design built from bold black outlines, spirals, scrolls and dots. Fine bands of parallel stripes run across the fingers and wrist, while the central medallion sits over the knuckles and fans out towards the wrist. The image is shown in black and grey with strong contrast against a dark background and a pale surface beneath the hand.

Blackwork Hand Mandala Swirl Spiral Dot Stripe Ornament Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferry from the mainland came to Skerrow only on Tuesdays when the wind allowed, and that spring the wind did not allow it for six weeks. Old Ailsa Brannock kept the lamp at the north point and wrote the weather in a ledger, and when the boat finally came she counted the crates twice, as she always did, because her father had told her that a crate miscounted is a crate the sea has already taken.

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The spiral-cutter came off that boat with a canvas bag and no luggage to speak of. He was a thin man from somewhere over the water, and he asked for a room above the fish shed. Nobody on Skerrow had a use for a man who drew on people, but the children followed him to the harbour wall to watch him mark the backs of the dockhands' hands with a pen dipped in soot. The lines were patient. Every island pattern he drew was a knot with no loose end, and the men said it looked like the ropes they had used since they were boys.

When the cutter asked Ailsa what the old pattern on the lamp-house door meant, she told him it was the shape the tide made when it turned on the reef, round and round and back on itself, and that if you followed it with your finger you would always end where you began. He thought about that for a day. Then he drew it on her palm, dot by dot, the stripes running across her fingers like the rungs of a ladder that did not go up.

The boat came back on the next Tuesday. Ailsa counted the crates, and then counted them again, and found them correct. She never did find out what he had done with the last of his soot, but the ledger that year recorded the sea as calm for the first time in living memory.