Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with a shaded feather above it, placed on a person's stomach beside a black lace top and denim shorts.

Mandala and feather on the stomach

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala sits on the abdomen, built from fine radiating linework, dense dotwork shading and a line of hanging dots that trail down from its edge. A feather drawn in soft grey shading sits above it, angled across the upper torso. The photograph is taken from above with the subject lying down, and the frame also includes a black lace top and denim shorts.

Dotwork Geometric Fine line Other Mandala Feather Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came in the night and by morning it had drawn a mandala across the kitchen window, petal over petal, with a row of beads running down from the lower rim where the glass had sweated. My father would have called it wasted work for the sun to undo. I stood with the kettle in my hand and counted the drops hanging from the sill, eleven of them, then lost count when the stove ticked.

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Down in the bottom field the ewes were huddled together like they had agreed to stay that way. Pim, the lad from the village who came on Saturdays for cash, found a grey goose feather caught in the wire of the far gate. He held it up to me as if it were a receipt. "Yours, is it?" I said no, the geese were Mrs Hallam's, and she had given up on them after the fox. Pim tucked it into his cap anyway.

That evening I climbed the loft ladder to fetch the lamb bottles and found Dad's old drawing book under the feed sacks. Pages of compasses and petals, every one drawn with a steel nib, the lines so fine they seemed to hum. On the last page he had sketched a feather beside a ring of dots, and written beneath it in pencil: keep the centre small, let the edges do the arguing. I had never once seen him finish anything.

I took the book down to the kitchen and set it on the table beside the cold kettle. Outside, the frost had begun to soften at its edges, the mandala loosening petal by petal, and I found I did not mind. I opened to a clean sheet, pressed the feather flat, and began at the middle.