Black linework heart framed by a scalloped mandala design on the upper arm, with a small cross and another dark tattoo partly visible nearby.

Mandala heart on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline heart sits at the centre of a dense, scalloped mandala border, drawn in fine, even black linework with no shading. The heart is worked into the inner upper arm, and a small cross mark sits to its right. The background is a dark textured wall, and a hand wearing rings is visible at the top left of the frame.

Geometric Upper arm Heart Mandala Cross Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum kept the pattern book on the windowsill above the sink, where the light off the harbour came in grey and even. Every winter she drew the same heart on squared paper, then built the border around it one scallop at a time, the way the Breton women built their collars, she said, starting from the point and working outwards until the edges met the paper's margin. I was twelve before I was allowed a pen near it.

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The heart was always left empty. I asked her once why she didn't fill it, and she said a heart was only a frame until someone came along to put something in it, and until then it was just a clean space to be patient in. She tapped the small cross she sometimes drew beside it, no bigger than a full stop, and said that was for the boats, so they'd know the way in.

When the trawler Morwenna Rose went down off the breakwater in February, nobody in town spoke for a week. Mum sat at the sink with the book open and drew without stopping, scallop after scallop, until her fingers were grey with pencil. On the eighth morning she pushed the book across the table to me. The heart was still empty, but the cross had moved to the corner of the page, and the border ran on past the margin and out of the frame, as if it had nowhere it needed to stop.