Black and grey full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm and shoulder, showing a cicada above mandala and lace-like geometric patterns with flowers, shown in four panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cicada and mandala full sleeve

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows a full sleeve tattoo with a large cicada at the top, above a central mandala and lace-like geometric panels. Flower shapes sit between the pattern sections, and the lower arm is filled with finer dotted and lined ornament. The work is in black ink and greys, with fine linework and stippled shading, and the four panels show the sleeve from front, side and back angles.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Insect Mandala Lace pattern Flower Geometric pattern Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pricking card had been soaking up the heat all afternoon, and Nell had given up trying to keep it flat. Her grandmother's pattern lay across the kitchen table in Ossett, the pins already rusting in their cushion, and the mandala on it was drawn so finely that Nell had to hold it to the window to see where one circle stopped and the next began.

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Outside, the cicada had found the sycamore by the coal bunker. It shrilled in the heat as if someone had drawn a bow across a saw, and her grandmother used to say it was the only creature in the street honest enough to admit how hot it was. Nell counted the pins. Forty-one to the first ring, sixty-three to the second. Gran had never written a number down in her life. She had carried them all in her wrists.

By evening the lace had begun to take. Nell worked the bobbins under the lamp while the wireless murmured the cricket scores, and at each flower-shaped gap she stopped and listened for the insect, which went quiet at dusk and then, with the first cool breath off the moor, started up again. It was the lattice she could not get right. The pattern bent back on itself at the edge, and no amount of counting made it meet.

At two in the morning she laid the strip beside the card and saw it. Gran had never meant the design to close. The lace ran on past the last pin, out over the edge of the card and into the margin, where a girl with a pencil had written in a hand Nell knew from birthday cards: keep going. Nell picked up the first bobbin again and started a new circle.