Black and grey botanical mandala tattoo on an upper arm, with fine line stars and script on the thigh and hip, photographed from above on a wooden floor.

Mandala, floral and star tattoos on thigh and arm

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman lies on a wooden floor, photographed from above, with her torso and upper legs visible and her face cropped out of frame. The arm across her stomach carries a large black and grey mandala and floral piece with dotted shading, and a cluster of fine line stars sits on the hip. Script lettering is visible on the thigh, and the image is dominated by greys and black ink against warm skin tones.

Botanical Fine line Thigh Upper arm Other Mandala Flower Star Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steward climbed to Scarrow on the third night of frost, carrying a lantern he did not light, because the moon was full enough to read the path by. He found Mother Ansel kneeling in the roofless nave, drawing rings on the flagstones with a stub of chalk. Each ring was packed with petals, and between the petals she set the points of small stars, one for every star she could count through the broken roof.

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"The lord wants these flags lifted," he said. "The stone is wanted for the new byre." She did not look up. She was filling the last dotted shading with the tip of a goose quill dipped in soot and vinegar, tap, tap, tap, as patient as rain. "Lift them, then," she said. "But the stars will not move for your byre, and the words under the third flag from the altar were not put there for your lord to read."

He laughed, because he was young and his fingers were numb. He pushed the crowbar under the nearest slab. The stone rang like a bell, and beneath it, where he expected earth, lay a second floor of pale slate, and on that a spiral of ivy, each leaf inked with a letter in a hand he had seen only on the lord's deeds. The letters spelled out his own name, and beside it a year that was three winters away.

He set the crowbar down on the far side of the chalk and walked back down the hill without his lantern, and he did not come to work at the byre the following spring. Mother Ansel kept her rings. In the village they say the flags of Scarrow are still warm in January, and that a boy who lifts one will find his own name waiting, neatly spelled, and nothing else at all.