Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo covering the tops of both feet, with a small outlined star near the toes of the right foot.

Mandala tattoo across both feet

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet are shown from above, with a large symmetrical mandala tattoo covering the top of each foot. The design uses fine black outlines filled with dense stippled dots and shading, with floral and petal shapes radiating from a central point. A small outlined star sits by the toes of the right foot, and the photograph is in black and white against a dark leather surface.

Dotwork Geometric Other Mandala Floral pattern Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down and hold your tongue till the kettle sings, because I'll not tell this twice. Nineteen thirty-one, at Harrow Pit, there was a lamp man called Joseph Pell who could not read a word but could draw a circle with a nail and a steady hand. He scratched them onto the timber props when the roof began to talk, rings opening out from a single dot like ripples in the drain water, and the men called them his clocks.

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The winter the lower seam flooded, Joseph sat with his daughter Ada at the cold range and pressed soot from the grate onto her paper, one dot, then another, until the whole sheet was freckled like a night sky. Each dot, he said, was a thing you had lost and must not lose twice. Petals grew from the middle, each one pointing at the next, so that no part of the pattern could stand alone. He stitched it onto her coat cuffs and the hem of her shawl. Ada laughed that it looked like a flower, and he said flowers were only the earth's way of keeping count.

When the cage came up short that spring, the rescue men found his sketchbook under the bench in the lamp room. Every page was a mandala, and on the last one a small five-pointed star had been pressed in beside the lowest petal, the lines gone over so many times the paper had nearly torn. Nobody could tell them what the star meant. Ada kept the book in the dresser drawer and never let anyone else open it.

Every spring after, when the pit whistle went for the day shift, she took the book out, licked her thumb, and pressed one fresh dot of soot beside the star. She said it was for the men who came back up, and the ones who didn't, and that a count kept honestly was the only kind of light a pit could be trusted with.