Neo-traditional mandala flower tattoo in pink, purple and teal with eye motifs, on the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful mandala flower on the back of a hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A radial mandala built around a large pink and purple flower with a yellow centre. Teal leaves and small eye-shaped motifs sit between scalloped rings of dotted and outlined petals. The bold black outlines and saturated colour are set against pale skin on the back of the hand, with a partial dark mark at the top left edge.

Neo-trad Botanical Hand Flower Mandala Leaf Eye Dot Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By three in the morning the corridor lights on Ward Six have dimmed to the amber they keep for sleeping patients, and you are the only one awake who knows where the spare blankets live. Mrs Okafor's buzzer goes off twice. You answer the first with a glass of water and the second with a story about a neighbour's cat that you half make up as you go.

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Above the nurses' station a round clock with a yellow face hangs where everyone can see it. Someone long ago pinned paper eyes cut from a colouring book to the corners of the notice board, and nobody ever took them down. You start calling the board the flower after Ruth, the agency nurse from Leeds, who swears the rota looks like a mandala if you stand at the right angle. Teal sticky notes ring the pink lamination, and a yellow highlighter circles the bed numbers.

At four the monitors begin their soft chorus and you do your rounds, counting pulses the way you'd count petals. Bed nine's son has been sleeping in the visitor chair for a week, folded like a coat. You tuck a blanket over his shoulder and he murmurs, without waking, that his mother used to read him the shipping forecast. You hum it under your breath while you check drips, Dogger, Fisher, German Bight, and the names line themselves up in order.

At six the sky over the car park turns the colour of a bruise going healthy, and the day staff come in smelling of rain. Ruth clocks out first and leans back round the door. "Did you see the board?" she asks. You say yes. Under the rota, someone has drawn the flower larger, its petals in pink and purple, and given it one more eye.