Colour neo-traditional tattoo of two mandala-style flowers with autumn leaves across a person's shoulder and upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala flowers and leaves on a shoulder

Neo-trad · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

Two mandala-style flowers sit side by side, one smaller and one larger, surrounded by outlined leaves in orange, yellow and brown. The larger flower has concentric rings of teal, grey, pink and red with a dark central star, while the smaller one has a teal centre and a grey and cream petal ring. Bold black outlines and soft grey shading around the motifs give the piece depth on the skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Shoulder Mandala Flower Leaf Rosette Petal Autumn leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Marian,

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The mason came up from Kendal on Tuesday with his boy and a handcart of lime, and I have spent three days watching them fail to lift the rose window out of the chapel wall. It is not a rose, whatever the parish records say. It is two wheels of coloured glass set side by side, the smaller with a teal boss at its heart and the larger ringed in red and grey, and somebody in the 1600s built the wall around them as if they were meant to be seen from the courtyard below. Most of the glass has gone. What remains is lead came shaped like petals, and in the gaps the autumn leaves blow in from the wood and lodge in the sockets like coins in a drain.

Yesterday I found the boy, Tobias, on his knees in the nave with a sheet of tracing paper, copying the centre of the big wheel. He had the dark star right on the first attempt, which I did not expect, and then spent an hour on the outer ring, counting the segments under his breath until he lost count at forty and started again. I asked him why he bothered when the window would only be taken down and carted off in crates. He said the drawing was the only part that would stay put.

I have not told him that I dreamt the window was whole again, every ring lit from behind by a sun that did not come up over the wall. I woke with the taste of lime and wet leaves in my mouth. Perhaps that is why I am writing to you rather than to the trustees.

Tobias has left his tracing tacked to the lectern. Tomorrow the crates come. I am going to stand under the arch and let the leaves settle on my hat until they stop.

Love, Edmund