Black and white photo of symmetrical geometric mandala blackwork tattoos on both forearms of a person seated on a chair.

Geometric mandala tattoos on both forearms

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two mirrored mandala designs run along the forearms, built from layered rows of pointed petals, triangles and radiating spikes. The linework is solid black with bold fills and no visible shading, and the image is monochrome. The forearms are shown centred in the frame, with the torso and a chair visible behind them.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Mandala Geometric pattern Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pyke had kept the pattern book for thirty years, and when the Holloway sisters came in asking for a matching pair of sunbursts, she took down the oldest one, the one with the cracked spine. Every petal in it had been counted by hand. "Two arms must never be the same arm twice," she said. "Mirror them or leave them alone."

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The sisters wanted their mother's church bazaar cloth, eighteen inches across, worked in white on black. Ada began at the centre, where the spikes all met, and worked outward. Each row of petals was a little harder than the last, the triangles nesting inside the points like boats in a harbour. The town clock struck the half hour and she did not look up. Her hands knew the count better than her eyes did.

On the third evening the cloth was finished but one edge would not meet its twin. Ada unpicked a full row, then another, until she found the fault: a single petal worked to the left where it should have turned right. She sat with the lamp pulled close and laughed quietly, because the mistake had been hers at the very start, and every piece after had only copied it faithfully.

She cut the thread, folded both cloths along the same crease and sent them off on the Thursday carrier. The sisters wrote later to say the bazaar had sold them within the hour, though neither could say which way the petals turned. Ada kept the pattern book open at that page all winter.