Colour and black ink tattoo of a woman in a geometric patterned dress on a woman's upper arm, with scalloped fan lines and dots around the figure.

Female figure in patterned dress on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A standing female figure in a long dress fills the upper arm, with her head and shoulders near the top of the sleeve. The dress is filled with bold concentric and hexagonal geometric patterns in orange, red, blue and grey, while the figure's hair and outline are in black linework. Black fan-like scallops, rows of dots and ink splatter surround the figure and fade into bare skin at the edges.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Woman Figure Dress Geometric pattern Scallop Dot Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chasuble came to me in March, folded in a crate that smelled of damp straw. Brother Hal, who had mended the abbey's vestments for thirty years before his eyes gave out, unpacked it on the long table and said nothing for a full minute. Then he lifted the hem and showed me the woman standing in a column of colour, arms held a little from her sides, as if she meant to step off the cloth and walk out of the room.

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The pattern was the hard part. Concentric rings in rust and ochre, hexagons in slate blue, all of it running down her skirt like light through a shutter. Hal sat beside me while I worked and watched the rings close without a ruler. Scallops marched across the sleeves like fish scales, and dots fell away from them in neat rows. Where the old ink had splashed, he told me to leave the spatter exactly as it lay. 'Mistakes are how the hand shows itself,' he said. 'Keep the ones that are honest.'

Under the lining I found a band of thread no wider than a fingernail, stitched in brown wool: MARGERY, NOVICE, 1887. Hal had known about it for decades and never said. She had sewn the dress, he told me, then been sent to the house on the coast the winter her cough would not clear. Nobody had asked her to sign her work. I asked him why he had not unpicked the name, and he shrugged and said it was not his to remove.

I finished the last dot on the Tuesday before Easter. My hand slipped on the final stroke and a fleck of blue flew off the brush onto the cloth. I left it where it landed, beside the hem, next to her name.