Black ink line drawing of a mandala and floral tattoo design with handwritten script, shown as a flash sketch, with no placement on the body.

Mandala and floral line design with script

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a tattoo design centred on two mandala motifs, one above and one below, linked by leaves, scrolls and dotted lines. A handwritten line of script curves around the upper mandala. The fine, even linework and stippled dots are drawn on plain white paper, with a black pen lying across the top right corner.

Geometric Botanical Lettering Mandala Flower Leaves Scroll Dot Script Lace Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern would not come right, and Mrs Hobbs said so every morning as she shook the cloth off the pillow. Nell had been pricking the same mandala onto parchment since the thaw, eight petals turning inward like a clock that had forgotten which way it was meant to run, and each time she lifted the pins the lace came out lopsided on one side. "You keep it where it's easy," Mrs Hobbs said. "Pin only what you can already see."

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So Nell carried the pillow down to the cold back room above the chandler's on Fore Street, where the window looked over the harbour wall and the gulls sat on the bollards with their feathers puffed against the wind. She worked by a single paraffin lamp. The bobbins clicked like small teeth. Whenever her hands found the rhythm the lace held its shape, and whenever she stopped to admire it she dropped a pair and had to unpick a whole inch back to where the mistake began.

On the last Thursday of February she stopped trying to make the mandala sit square and let the dotted lines run where they wanted, out past the edge of the pricking card and into the margin where Mrs Hobbs had once scribbled a note about the wind. The lace went wild for an hour, and then, as the lamp guttered, it curled itself into a ring, lighter at the heart than she had intended.

Mrs Hobbs held it up to the window in the morning and said nothing for a long time. Then she took her scissors from her apron, snipped the first pin loose and said, "Now it's grown."