Three views of a full arm sleeve tattoo with grey dotwork mandalas and a flower of life pattern on the upper arm, and red and teal feather forms running down the forearm.

Full sleeve of mandalas and red and teal feathers

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The sleeve covers the upper arm and forearm with a large grey mandala at the shoulder, a flower of life pattern below it, and a second dotwork mandala further down. Red, orange and teal feather or flame forms rise from the wrist and sweep up the arm, bordered by dark outlines. The three photographs show the same sleeve from front, side and rear angles against a plain white top and wooden floor.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Forearm Mandala Flower of life Feather Flame Geometric pattern Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Tamsin Coyle had a compass that had belonged to her grandfather, a brass thing with one leg worn bright from being pressed into card. Every evening after the shop shut in Hebden Bridge she sat at the long table under the window and drew circles inside circles until the paper ran out of room. Her lace patterns were sold to dressmakers in Leeds and to one costumier in London who never once wrote to thank her.

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The bird arrived in October, a grey thing with a ruined wing, and it perched on the sill as if it had been waiting for the lamp. She did not feed it. She only watched it preen, and each time it shook its feathers loose a few fell onto the pattern she was working, and each feather was warm. By the third night the edges of the lace had begun to curl and glow orange where the feathers lay, and she found she could not lift them without burning her fingertips.

She kept the design anyway. When the dressmakers came for the order she laid the cloth across the table and the bird was gone, and in its place the lace rose from the wrist of the pattern in long tongues of red and teal, sweeping up toward the centre of the largest circle where the compass point had gone through the paper. She folded the cloth twice and sent it north without a note. The bird, she supposed, had found its own way out.