Two palms facing the camera, covered in black mandala-style geometric tattoos with dotwork on the fingers and decorative script running down the fingers and wrists.

Mandala and script tattoos on both hands

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

Two open palms face the camera, each covered with a central rosette mandala surrounded by ornamental geometric shapes and fine dotwork on the fingers. Bands of decorative script wind from the fingers down toward the wrists and forearms. The work is entirely black ink in solid fills and fine lines, set against pale skin and a softly lit indoor background.

Dotwork Geometric Hand Forearm Mandala Rosette Script Calligraphy Dotwork Geometric pattern Hand Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Agathe had the ink ground by the time the lamp was lit, and she did not ask whether I was ready. She only held out her hands the way she held them over the bread. "Palms up, and keep still for the cold part," she said. The rosette went on first, a wheel of petals around a dark eye, then the shapes like folded hills, then the dots along each finger, one prick for every name the forest had taken from Hollow End in her lifetime.

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The script came last. It ran from my fingertips down the outside of each hand and wound round the wrist, and she would not let me read it. "Read it at the far side of the wood," she said, "and not a step before." I asked what would happen if I read it early. She dipped the needle and said nothing, which in Hollow End meant the answer was plain and would only frighten me.

So I went with my hands bound in clean linen, past the stile, past the place where the wheat stopped and the oaks began. Somewhere in the second hour the path forked three ways and my palms began to itch under the cloth. I unwrapped the left one by the last of the light. The letters had settled into the skin like rain into moss, and I could read the first word of the line that circled my wrist. It was my own name.

I turned round. Far back among the trunks, the lamp was still burning in Agathe's window, small and steady, and I understood she had been reading me all along.