Dotwork mandala tattoo on the stomach

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large black mandala with scrolled petals and dotted shading sits centrally on the abdomen, with small diamond shapes radiating outward. A small black arrow tattoo with linework detail sits at the left side, near the waistband of the lingerie. The image is in black ink only, with the warm skin tones and black lace framing the tattoos.

Dotwork Geometric Other Mandala Arrow Diamond Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart hung above the galley range, held up by four bread knives because the bulkhead had no other nails. Nobody aboard the Tern Glory could say who had drawn it. The Irish Sea appeared as a great circle of fine stipple, every rock and shoal marked with a single dot, and the soundings coiled outward from a centre where the compass rose ought to be. Diamonds of ink sprang off its rim like sparks from a grinder.

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Ruth Calloway, the mate, swore it was a mandala and that old skippers had steered by such things, reading the swell in the scrolls. I told her it was a recipe for stew nobody could read. Then there was the arrow, small and barbed, pointing at the galley door from the corner where Anglesey should have been. Ruth said it meant the cook was always to blame. I said that was the only accurate thing on it.

In February a gale came in off Bardsey with the wind backing west, and the radar went grey with rain. The instruments lied twice before lunch. I stood at the range with my hands flat on the steel and stared at the chart until the dots stopped being dots and became a count. Forty-one stippled rocks from the outer ring to the ring of diamonds, the way Ruth had shown me. The diamonds were the channel marks. The arrow was the turn.

We raised the Holyhead breakwater light at four in the morning, exactly where the spirals had said it would be. Ruth came down wet to the elbows and found me scrubbing the chart with a tea towel. 'Leave it,' she said. 'It's done its job.' I left it, though the ink had started to run from the damp, and the arrow still pointed at the door, which was, I suppose, its way of saying thank you.