Close-up of a colourful mandala tattoo with a red rose below it on an upper arm, beside a turquoise squash blossom necklace and a patterned dress.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and rose tattoos on an upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows a close-up of a torso and upper arm, with a silver and turquoise squash blossom necklace and a dark patterned dress in the frame. On the arm, a large mandala tattoo in greys, greens and oranges sits above a red rose with green leaves, both drawn with clean outlines and shaded petals. The composition is cropped tightly, with the tattoos forming the right edge of the image and the jewellery and fabric dominating the left.

Geometric Traditional Upper arm Mandala Rose Leaves Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road past Salt Hollow Wells had no name on the map, only a number the wind kept rubbing off. Ada Pruitt drove it every Thursday with a sack of cut turquoise behind her seat, trading the stones at the post for flour, wire and tinned peaches, and she never looked at the rose that grew out of the cracked shoulder of the tarmac, though she heard her tyres pass over its stalk every time.

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Her brother Teodor said the rose was a warning. Nobody watered it, and nothing else grew within a mile of it, yet it flowered red each spring with leaves the green of old copper. He said the men who laid the road had buried a girl under that shoulder before the tar went down, and that the rose was her way of asking to be let out. Ada laughed at him until the summer the water tank went dry and she began to drive past slower, watching the petals close and open in the heat.

One evening she stopped the van, took a stick from the verge and drew a ring in the dust, then another inside it, then a third, until she had a mandala as wide as a cartwheel with its rings all turning on one centre. She sat in the middle of it while the light went orange and then grey. In the morning the rose had bent over in the night, its head turned toward the circles as if it had been listening.

She did not drive that road again. The council later widened it, and the men with the machines cut a new bend around the place where the rose stood, because the foreman swore he could not get a blade through the dust inside the rings. Teodor still goes out there with a jug of water when the wind is down, and he says the rose is open every day now, and it has never once turned back toward the town.