Line drawing of a circular yantra-style design in gold, with radiating motifs and rings of script, shown alongside silver and gold variants.

Gold radial yantra design with script

Colour · Flash

A radial, circular design built from concentric rings of script, with ornate tabs and rays extending outwards in a symmetrical pattern. The linework is uniform and clean, drawn as single-weight outlines with no shading. The main version is in gold on a white background, with a smaller silver version and a smaller gold version beneath it.

Mandala Script Sacred geometry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table on the Marisol Bay was bolted to the deck so it could not wander, the only thing aboard I trusted. Somewhere south of Sri Lanka, with the swell lifting the stern like a hand under a tray, Auntie Noi unrolled a sheet of paper across it and asked me to read the ring of letters aloud. She had printed it at a temple stall in Bangkok, gold ink on cheap white card, and folded it into my seabag with a packet of dried mango and a warning about salt water.

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I read badly. My Thai was the kitchen kind, prices and please and thank you, and the script wound inward through three circles like a river finding its mouth. She laughed at my vowels and took the card back, tracing the tabs with a fingernail. "Each one holds a sound," she said. "Say them wrong and they still work, only slower."

The second engineer, a Scot called Morrison who believed in nothing he could not torque, watched us from the galley hatch with a mug of tea going cold. On the fourth night a bearing seized in the port shaft and he came up sweating, asking whether I had any of that magic paper. I did not. But Noi had left a copy pinned above the engine room door, and when we got down there the gold had caught the work lamp so brightly it looked lit from behind.

We fixed the bearing by dawn. Morrison never mentioned the paper again, but he began leaving a mug of tea on the galley ledge every watch, cold, as if it were owed to something that had kept our shaft turning. Noi was waiting on the quay at Felixstowe with her umbrella up. I handed her the card. It was creased now, salt-stained at one corner, and she smoothed it flat against her coat like a letter from home.