Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with the words Let it be in fine script above it, on the inner forearm.

Let it be mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala with layered petal shapes sits across the forearm, with delicate sprays of fine lines extending to each side. The mandala is built from stippled dots and shaded fills, with thin outlines defining the petals and hanging drop details. The words Let it be are written in a fine, slanted script above the central motif, and the tattoo is shown in black ink and grey tones on skin.

Dotwork Fine line Lettering Forearm Mandala Floral Script Let it be Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the canvas has ears and tonight the ears are all mine. You want the last of the Halloran Brothers? Then listen. The big top at Penhallow had gone the colour of weak tea by autumn, and the rings were sold off one by one to a car park in Swindon. But the mandala was the thing old Mrs Verity Quaile kept in her trunk. She had painted it herself on a sheet of calico, a great flower of petals opening from one point, like the centre pole seen from underneath.

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Every evening the wagons would circle, and she'd lay that calico on the sawdust, and the children would sit inside its rings. Her husband Tobias juggled badly and drank well, and he wanted to sell it for the fare to Bristol. She told him no. A flower that size could not be bought, only kept. When he asked what it was for, she tapped the words stitched along the top edge in careful, leaning letters: Let it be.

Winter came in off the moors and the lights failed one by one. The last show was in a field outside Launceston with eleven people in the stands, four of them asleep. Tobias stood at the back with the trunk open, ready to take the calico, and found his wife already sitting on it, knitting in the lamplight. Let it be, she said, and went on counting stitches. He sat down beside her, and the petals of the great flower curled up around them both like the last of the light.

In the morning the field was empty, the wagons gone, and the calico lay folded in the hay with one petal stitched in gold thread that nobody remembered sewing. Tobias never sold a thing again. He kept the flower in a drawer, and some nights he unfolded it on the kitchen table in Bristol and sat with his tea going cold, and let it be.