Black and grey mandala tattoo with dotwork detail covering the back of a hand and onto the wrist.

Black mandala tattoo across the back of a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala with a central rosette, petal shapes and scalloped borders covers the back of the hand and extends down towards the wrist. The design is built from fine lines, stippled dots and rows of short hatched marks, with shading in greys that gives it depth. The photograph is taken from above, showing the hand against a wooden floor with a pair of trainers at the bottom of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Hand Mandala Flower Circle Lace Dot Rosette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern came up from Nottingham rolled in brown paper, and Mam held it to the gas lamp as if it might be hot. A mandala, the man at the mill called it, though nobody in Brinsley had a word for that and nobody wanted one. It was a wheel of lace the size of a dinner plate, with a rosette at its heart, petals ringed round it, and scalloped edges that dropped down the sheet like the fringe on a good tablecloth.

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My job was the pricking. I laid the paper over the felt on the kitchen table and drove a pin through every mark the draughtsman had made, one dot after another, until the whole design stood out in a field of tiny holes that the bobbins would later follow. Dad's boots came up the step at six with the pit still on them, and I was still at it, the lamp hissing, the kettle going cold beside me. By the third night my fingertips had a row of pale craters that stung when I lifted a cup.

Dad came in one night and stood behind my chair without saying anything for a long while. He had worked the face for twenty-two years and his hands were the kind that could feel a fault in the seam before the roof said anything. He leaned over, put one thick finger on the paper and touched the centre. "Start from the middle," he said. "Go out from there. If you go the other way the paper tears, and the rest never holds." So I did. I started at the rosette and worked outward, and the thing stopped being a puzzle and became a kind of weather I could walk into.

That spring the pit went out on strike and the mill went quiet with it, but the lace did not stop. For a month every front room in the village had bobbins clicking like a clock nobody had told to slow down. The finished piece went to a girl in Eastwood who was getting married in June, and I never saw her face. I kept the pricked paper, though. Holes all the way through. In the middle, where I began, there is one pin-hole a little larger than the others, where I pressed too hard on the first night and had to go back and start again.