Fine white-ink geometric flower of life tattoo on the palm of an open hand against a dark fabric background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Flower of life on a palm

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

An open palm shows a tattoo of overlapping circles forming a flower of life pattern, drawn in fine light or white ink. The linework is thin and even, with the pattern filling a roughly circular area at the centre of the palm. The dark fabric behind the hand makes the pale design stand out, and the photograph is framed from above.

Geometric Hand Flower of life Circle Geometric pattern Palm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Thursday the tide came over the stone breakwater at Crabbe's Reach and left a film of wet salt on the boarding house step, and every Thursday Mrs Ivy Penhallow swept it off before the lodgers were up. She did not mind the sweeping. What she minded was the drawing the sea left behind when it drew back: a flower of overlapping circles, six petals round each, pressed clean into the grey sand as though someone had dipped a compass and walked away.

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The lodgers said it was the ferryman's doing, or the drowned curate's, and the boy who carried coal said it was only the way water pulls at sand. Mrs Penhallow kept her own counsel. Her grandmother had told her the pattern was a map of how everything was joined, each ring cutting through the next so that no single circle could stand without its neighbours, and that the sea only drew it when someone under the roof was about to leave.

One October a sailor's widow named Tamsin Roskilly came up the cliff path with a battered trunk and a cough, and asked for the attic room. She stayed eleven weeks. On the last morning she found Mrs Penhallow on her knees by the step, tracing the seventh circle with one finger, and laughed. 'You'll go mad counting petals,' she said. Mrs Penhallow handed her the broom. 'Then count them with me,' she said, and they swept the step together, and when the tide came in that Thursday it drew nothing at all.

Tamsin wrote from Penzance that spring to say she had found a house with a garden and a kitchen door that did not face the water. Mrs Penhallow kept the broom by the door and swept the step every morning anyway, in case.