Black mandala tattoo on the back of a hand

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A dense black mandala sits on the back of the hand near the wrist, built from concentric rings, scalloped petals and small circles. Fine dotted accents continue onto the fingers, and the lines are crisp with solid areas of black ink. The image is in black and grey tones against a dark sleeve and pale bedding, with the hand resting on a bare leg above black lace.

Geometric Dotwork Hand Mandala Dot Circle Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and put another log on, Edwin, because the cold in this tale is the sort that gets into your teeth. The mere behind Mossgate Farm froze so hard that January the carp stopped swimming and hung in the ice like buttons in a jar. Young Sam Harker, who was too proud to walk round anything, went out across the ice with a flat grey stone from the wall in his fist.

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He knelt with his ear close to the cold and let the stone go. It didn't crack the ice. The sound went out in rings, one inside the next, the way rings spread from the middle of a stopped clock's face when you tap the glass. Where each ring met the frost, the white opened into scalloped petals, sharp as cut paper, and small black dots of rook feathers and beech leaves came up through the crust like seeds. Sam counted eleven rings before the mere went quiet.

Then the whole round of it began to turn. The petals folded back, the rings drew tight into one dark eye at the centre, and the ice began to hum the way a kettle does before it boils. Sam understood the mere wanted its stone kept, and he said no, because he was seven and stubborn and that stone was the best he owned.

So the mere kept it. Every hard winter since, the ice over Mossgate sets in that same pattern, and if you hold your hand over your eyes and squint at the pond from the lane, you'll see the petals and the little dots, right where Sam's mittens lay. He grew old and went to sea, and he never once walked round a thing again. Now bank that fire up, for the frost is drawing the same shape on the kitchen window as we speak.