Woman in a white mesh top taking a mirror selfie, showing a grey dotwork mandala tattoo centred below the bust and a shaded realism rose tattoo on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and rose tattoos on chest and arm

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in a white mesh bralette takes a mirror selfie, with a phone held over her face, so her features are hidden. A large black and grey mandala with hanging dotwork dangles sits centrally below the bust, and a shaded rose with dark petals and soft grey highlights covers the upper arm near the shoulder. A silver cross pendant on a cord hangs at the centre of the frame, and the image is lit warmly against a plain mirror.

Dotwork Realism Chest Upper arm Mandala Rose Cross Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The doily was already half-finished on the cutting table when Mrs Hollis set you to the last of the hanging tassels, the little black beads that dropped from its rim like rain caught in mid-fall. Outside, the bell at the Co-op rang for the half past shift and the market stalls were folding up along Chapel Street. You held the needle in one hand and angled the lamp low, counting knots the way your mother counted her rosary, under her breath and without looking.

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Everything in that shop was for somebody else's wedding or christening. The pattern had come up from Leeds in a parcel of wool, a Dutch book with a centre so tightly worked it had stopped being a flower and become a compass. Mrs Hollis said the women in the almshouses would pay a week's wages for one. She never said what they did with them. You suspected they hung them over the bed, where the morning light could find the beads.

On the Friday a stranger came in off the bus carrying a silver cross on a black cord. He wanted the pattern copied from the pawned thing's tassels, he said, and he wanted it done before Sunday. Mrs Hollis looked at the cross for a long time, then at you, and said nothing about the price.

You finished the last tassel after the bell had gone again. Thirty-two beads, one for each hour you had spent at that table that week. The stranger came back at closing, paid in coins warm from his pocket, and left with the doily folded in tissue. Mrs Hollis tied the string and handed you the cross to hold while she knotted it. Even after all afternoon in your palm, the silver stayed cold.