Black ink Flower of Life mandala with a spiked outer ring on the inner forearm of a person in a grey t-shirt, against a painted brick wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower of Life mandala on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a circular geometric design on the forearm, made of overlapping circles forming a lattice inside a solid outer ring of pointed triangular spikes. The linework is fine and even, with some stippled shading in the outer petals, and the design is entirely black ink with no colour. The arm is shown at an angle against a pale brick wall with dark graffiti marks, and the wearer's face is not in frame.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Flower of life Mandala Sun Geometric pattern Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lens came up from Glasgow in pieces, packed in straw and sacking, and it took me three weeks to learn the sum of it. Every prism sat in its brass ring like a bead on a wire, and that ring sat in another, and so on out to the iron cradle, until the whole thing was a sun folded inside itself. Old Tennant said it was all arithmetic. Bethany said it was witchcraft. I said nothing, because I was the one with the spirit level and the cold hands.

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Winter came in on the fourth of November with a wind that bent the rail. I climbed the spiral each night with the paraffin and the chamois, and I learned to count the rings in the dark by touch: eleven to the centre, thirty-six facets in the outer band where the light broke into spears. When the mechanism ran true, the beam swept the water in a slow wheel, and the lattice of shadows across the glass turned with it, circles inside circles, never quite lining up the same way twice.

On the ninth night the clockwork seized. I found the fault by counting, not looking, my fingers finding one bearing a hair out of true. I shimmed it with a sliver of tin from a biscuit tin, and the sun came back to life against the cloud. Out on the Sound a trawler turned its nose away from the Skerry, and its lamp answered mine twice before it went home.

Tennant died in February. I have kept the light on his birthday every year since, and each dawn I sketch the lens into the log, a ring of spikes around a lattice, the one shape the sea never bothers to copy.