Colour tattoo of a large paisley with a mandala flower centre and scrollwork on the upper leg, shown in pink, teal, yellow and green.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful paisley with mandala flower on upper leg

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A large paisley motif sits at the centre, with a flower-like mandala in the middle of its body and scroll and dot detailing along its edge. Surrounding it are scalloped teal and pink shapes, an orange and yellow floral section on the right, and fine red and pink vine tendrils at the top. The bold outlines and saturated, layered colour fill the whole composition.

Thigh Paisley Mandala Flower Scroll Swirl Vine Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The loom-mother of Ardenvale had one rule for the cloth-makers' children: never sew a pattern you have not first walked around. So when young Tovi Marrow came back from the seed-markets with a bolt of dyed silk the colour of a bruised plum, she was sent straight to the orchard wall to pace out the shape of the tear her grandfather had left in the old flag. The tear was shaped like a teardrop with its tail curled back on itself, and everyone in the valley knew it, because the flag had flown over the granary for three hundred years.

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Tovi did not walk it. She sat on the wall with her knees under her chin and unpicked the silk thread by thread, laying each strand out in the sun by colour. Teal, rose, marigold, a red so deep it looked wet. The loom-mother came out with a cup of barley tea and found the girl humming and the whole wall stitched with little coils, each one a tiny spiral like a fern unrolling, each one dotted at the tip with a seed. Inside the curled tear Tovi had worked a flower, six petals opening in a ring, and round the flower a second ring of petals that the loom-mother could not, for a moment, tell apart from the first.

"You've stitched the flag back," the loom-mother said, not angrily.

"I've stitched what it was going to be," said Tovi. "The tear was never a hole. It was a seed case, and the orchard has been waiting for it to split."

The loom-mother drank her tea slowly. Then she pulled the flag from the granary door, laid it over the wall, and found that the scalloped edges of the old cloth fitted Tovi's pink and teal edging exactly, as if they had been cut from the same bolt. By evening the whole village was out with needles. Nobody walked the shape. They simply sewed.