Black and grey photo of a mandala-style flower tattoo in fine linework on a forearm, with a rose outline on the upper arm and small Greek letters and numerals on the inner forearm.

Mandala flowers on forearm with rose and letters

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two arms of a person whose face is not visible. A dense mandala of layered petals and flowers in fine black linework covers the outer forearm and elbow, with a rose outline on the upper arm and shoulder. Small black lettering and numerals sit on the inner forearm, and the image is shot in black and white against a plain light background.

Botanical Geometric Fine line Forearm Upper arm Shoulder Mandala Flower Rose Numeral Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The glasshouse at Quarry Bank had three hundred and eighty-two panes, and Mrs Pell counted every one of them on the first Monday of each month, pencil behind her ear, sleeves pushed past the elbow. A cracked pane let the frost in before anyone noticed, she said, so you walked the frame like a sentry. Her nephew Tomas came up from the coast that autumn to learn the trade, and he thought the counting was fussiness until the morning she sent him to the potting bench for the tin.

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The tin held cuttings wrapped in wax paper, each tied with thread and marked in pencil with three Greek letters. Mrs Pell said they were the initials of three women who had shared one rose bush in a village with no name on any map, each taking a slip when the wall came down. The letters were not hers to explain, she said, only to keep. Tomas unwrapped the oldest slip, brown and stiff as a bootlace, and asked whether it would take. She shrugged and told him it had been waiting forty years for someone patient enough to find out.

He potted it in the corner where the sun lingered longest and forgot about it through the cold months, checking the pane count instead, as she had taught him. In May a single bud split open, then another, and by midsummer the bush had made a flower that was not quite a rose at all. Its petals rose in rings, each ring folding inward like the spokes of a wheel, and in the centre sat a small hard seed-head the colour of a clock face. He drew it for her on the back of a seed packet.

Mrs Pell looked at the drawing for a long time, then took the pencil from behind her ear and counted the petals in the outer ring. Tomas laughed, then went out to the glasshouse and counted the panes himself. There were three hundred and eighty-two, as ever, but the corner by the potting bench held one more sound pane than she had ever admitted to, and no one had put it there.