Black mandala flower design with vine lines and a dotted wrist band on the back of a hand, worn with silver rings and black stiletto nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala flower design on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black mandala-style flower with a layered centre sits on the back of the hand, with long stems running down towards the wrist. Fine vine lines and small leaves extend across the fingers, and a dotted band circles the wrist. The design is solid black on pale skin, with silver rings and black nails framing the hand against a plain white background.

Botanical Geometric Hand Flower Mandala Vine Leaves Dot Wrist band Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Haddow kept the back room of the Palais at Ferrin Bridge, and on Saturdays she sat on the bottom stair with a saucer of dark paste and a bundle of cocktail sticks, drawing flowers on the girls' hands while the band tuned up through the floor. Nobody had ever seen her dance. She said her hands were for drawing and the paste was for the rest.

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Nell Corran came in with her aunt's silver rings already on three fingers and asked for something that would last past the last waltz. Mrs Haddow took her wrist, turned the palm down, and drew a round bloom on the back of the hand, then ran two long stems from it down towards the bone. 'The paste fades in a fortnight,' she said, 'but a stem doesn't stop where the fading does. Dots at the wrist, one for each dance you say yes to.' Nell laughed and said that was a poor way to keep a tally of nothing.

The band struck up a foxtrot and a lanky boy from the docks asked her, then asked again after the second dance, and again after the third. Each time Nell gave him her left hand and felt the dots at her wrist pull tight, as though the paste had decided to do its own counting. By the last waltz the stems had reached the cuff of her blouse and the dots ran in a neat black band from wrist to knuckle.

She went home along the canal with the rings clicking together and the boy's coat over her shoulders. Mrs Haddow was right about the fortnight. What stayed, after the flower had faded to the colour of weak tea, was one dot that nobody had drawn, sitting a little apart from the rest, and Nell did not count it.