Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a geometric flower across the back of a hand, with a tessellated cube pattern running up the forearm.

Geometric flower and tessellation on hand and forearm

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A large geometric flower made of layered leaf-like petals covers the back of the hand and wrist, with a three-dimensional tessellated pattern continuing up the forearm. Bold black outlines define the petals, while stippled dotwork shading fills the background and adds depth to the petals. The image is a black and white close-up of the hand and arm against a dark jacket sleeve and denim.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Hand Forearm Flower Leaves Geometric pattern Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ansell wanted the hallway floor finished before the Thursday, and the Thursday was the only thing Idris Hale could think about as he knelt in the wet bed of mortar at 14 Carrow Street. The pattern was her idea. Three rhombi pressed together so that every join looked like a stair going up and a stair going down at once. She had drawn it on the back of a gas bill with a ruler she kept tucked in her apron.

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"Count the cubes," she said from the doorway. "Tell me how many."

He counted from the front step, as he always did. Eleven. Then from the back door, twelve. He told her so, and she nodded as though he had confirmed something she had kept in a drawer for years.

The flower came last. She wanted it in the centre, a bloom of petals cut from the dark slate, and he pressed each leaf with the blunt end of a nail so the grey stone pricked up like frost on a window. It took him three nights. By the Wednesday the petals had a grain to them that the light caught differently at every hour, and the cubes around them seemed to lean in, the way a crowd leans toward a fire.

On Thursday she came down the stairs in her good shoes, stood on the last cube, and tilted her head. "Twelve," she said, pleased. Then she stepped off, looked back, and laughed. Idris looked too. From where she stood the flower had turned its petals the other way round, and the stairs that had gone up now went down. He never did learn which view she had paid for.