Two views of a forearm tattoo: a black dotwork mandala with watercolour splashes in blue, purple and pink, placed on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black mandala with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The image shows two views of the same forearm, one close and one angled towards the hand. A central black mandala with a circular, flower-like pattern is built from fine linework and stippled dots, with a solid black outline and a blank centre. Soft watercolour-style washes in blue, violet and magenta run down from above and below the mandala, fading into the bare skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Ada,

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The rose window at St Brannock's came down in pieces on Tuesday, and I have spent three evenings since laying them out on the vestry floor like a jigsaw nobody asked for. Mr Ferriby says the lead has gone as brittle as old toffee, so every came has to be eased off with a knife no thicker than a hair. You would hate it. You would also have the whole thing reassembled by Friday.

The centre is the trouble. Eighteen petals of black glass ring a hole where the boss should be, and nobody can say what it held. Mr Ferriby thinks a sun. The vicar's wife swears it was a lamb. I found a scrap under the pews that is not black at all but a bruised blue, streaked with violet where the light used to come through, and I have been holding it up to the east window every morning like a fool.

Yesterday I borrowed the parish ledger, the one with the 1872 sketches, and there it was: a dotted mandala, every petal fine as lace, and beside it a note in a clerk's hand. Colour to be washed in from the sill. Never done. The centre was left blank on purpose, the clerk wrote, so the light could decide.

So I am going to leave it blank too. Ferriby is furious. I think he is wrong, and I think the light will make better company than any lamb.

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