Black and grey mandala tattoo with heart and flower motifs covering the back of a hand and wrist.

Mandala tattoo across the back of a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed mandala design covers the back of the hand and wrist, with a central radial flower surrounded by heart-shaped and scrolling motifs. The work uses fine black linework and solid black accents, with some areas of dense stippled fill. The design is centred on the back of the hand and extends partly onto the fingers, with the skin tone and dark background giving strong contrast.

Blackwork Geometric Hand Mandala Flower Heart Scroll Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The well at Halvon Crossing had been dry for three summers when the widow Ines Marrow came down the road with a donkey, a tin trunk and a sack she would not let anyone lift. The carters laughed at her. What would a woman want with a crossing where nothing grew but thorn? She only nodded, unpacked a pair of brass dividers and a bottle of soot and oil, and knelt in the dust beside the stones with her sleeves pushed to the elbow.

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She drew a ring first, then a smaller ring inside it, working outward from a single point the way a spider works from its middle. Into the rings she set a flower with a hundred thin petals, then a crown of hearts pointing towards it, each heart tucked into a curl of scrolling vine. The wind rose every evening and smoothed her work away, and every morning she drew it again. The children of the crossing followed her about, counting the hearts under their breath, and by the second week the carters had stopped laughing.

One of them, a man called Oss whose brother had gone out onto the salt flats and not come back, sat with her one night and asked why she kept making hearts. She said a heart was the only shape that could hold two directions at once, one towards the road behind and one towards whatever was ahead, and that a person could not be expected to choose between them. Oss said nothing. He went home and did not sleep.

The rain came on the forty-first morning, a grey, heavy rain that filled the ruts and ran down the road in ribbons. When it cleared, the sand in the widow's pattern had held the water in its hearts and petals, and the well beneath had begun to fill from below. Oss walked out at dawn and found her sitting by the flower at the centre, where a small round pool shone like a coin. She had gone, leaving the dividers on the sand. He knelt, cupped his hands in the middle of the flower, and drank.