Black dotwork and linework mandala and paisley tattoo across the upper arm and shoulder, with light blue leaf shapes behind it.

Mandala and paisley design on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large mandala and paisley design covers the upper arm and shoulder, with a central mandala surrounded by smaller medallions and curling paisley shapes. The design is built from black linework and dense dotwork shading, with a few grey tones. Light blue and teal leaf shapes sit behind the main motifs, and faint reddish marks appear on the skin near the lower edge.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Mandala Paisley Medallion Leaves Dot Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the stove and stop picking at that rope, or I'll stop. Your great-aunt Nell kept the Marigold on the Regent's Canal with a cargo of Kashmir shawls that a merchant in Limehouse swore were woven by moonlight. Nobody asked him how. Nell asked him to mind the lock gates.

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One February the top gate at Camden gave way and a bale split open in the cut. Silk unrolled across the water like a slow fountain, paisley teardrops curling one into another, and where the dye ran blue the weed below turned teal. Nell hauled out what she could. Most of it was ruined. The middle of one shawl was not. A great round medallion sat there with its rings of dots still sharp as frost, and she lay on the cabin floor all night with a needle, stitching the dots back into place one by one, counting them under her breath until the stove went out.

The merchant came in March, pale and smelling of tobacco, demanding his due. Nell did not argue. She unrolled the patched shawl across the table and watched him see the centre, a ring of light where the silk had gone pale in the water and she had left it that way, a moon that had come up out of the canal.

He bought nothing that day. He stood on the towpath a long time, and when he finally left, the water had gone quiet and the moon was still caught in the cloth, the dots rippling outward as if something had just dropped into the river.