Black and grey mandala and rose tattoo on a forearm, with dotwork lines on the back of the hand and small chevrons on the fingers.

Mandala and rose forearm with hand dotwork

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A person looks down at their outstretched arm and hand, showing a large mandala and rose tattoo on the forearm. The hand carries fine dotted linework, including star-like dots and arcs, and two small chevron marks on the fingers. The ink is black and grey against a plain grey concrete background, and the rest of the frame shows ripped denim jeans and a white top.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Forearm Hand Mandala Rose Chevron Dot Star Arc Linework

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You arrive on the rock in October with a kit bag and a tin of tea that Dorothy Pascoe packed for you, and the relief boat's engineer tells you the light has not once gone out in sixty years. You nod as if that is a comfort. The island is three acres of wet granite, a dozen gulls, and a lamp room where the brass has gone green at the seams.

Keep reading

Your predecessor, Alfie Treloar, left a logbook with a page of pricked dots in the margin: small stars joined by arcs, and a chevron beside each date when the sky was clear. You assume it is a tally of weather. On the third night, with cloud sealing the horizon, you hold the page up to the lamp and see it is a chart. The arcs trace the sweep of the beam, the stars are the ships he steered past the Shearing Stones, and the chevrons mark the nights the Plough showed through.

You stop trying to read the weather and start reading him. You count sixty-one chevrons in one winter and notice the dots crowd together whenever the fog rolled in from the west. At dawn you walk down to the landing and find a dinghy pulled above the tideline with its oars still shipped, which Alfie would never have left. You tie the painter, drag the boat higher, and go back up to the lamp room to add one more arc to the page.