Small black dotwork mandala tattoo with petal shapes and a central star, sitting on the inner forearm of a person resting a hand on the arm.

Dotwork mandala on the forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small mandala design made of concentric rings, lotus-like petals and a central eight-pointed star, with small leaf shapes at the outer edge. The lines are black and built up with fine stippled dots that give the petals and background a soft shaded texture. The tattoo sits centrally on a light skin tone, with a white garment at the left and a hand resting on the forearm below it.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Flower Lotus Petal Star Circle Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pardoe had kept the boarding house on Gull Stair for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had been allowed to touch the brass compass set into the hall floor. Edith was only permitted to dust around it. So when the tide came up through the cellar one March and lifted the boards, she was the one on her knees with a torch, counting the rings of old inlay as the water sucked back out.

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There were eleven rings, not ten as the lodgers liked to claim. Between them ran petals of pale lead, each one stippled with thousands of tiny pits where someone had punched the metal with a nail, so the whole thing looked like frost on a window. At the centre an eight-pointed star opened outward like an open hand. She sat back on her heels with the lamp in her lap and realised the points were not decoration. Each one lined up with a hook on the back of a different door in the house.

Nobody had ever told her what the hooks held. She tried the linen press under the stairs and found a tin with a bell's clapper inside, green with age and wrapped in oilcloth. Then the coal hatch. Then the scullery door. By dawn she had seven clappers laid out on the flags like teeth, and Mrs Pardoe was standing in the doorway in her dressing gown, not angry at all, only tired.

"You've found the bells, then," she said. "Ring them in order and the tide goes back where it belongs."

Edith looked at the leaf shapes at the rim of the star, which she had taken for ornament, and understood they were a sequence. She fitted the first clapper to its hook, the one nearest the sea door, and the house began, very faintly, to hum.