Black and grey mandala tattoo with a dense geometric pattern on a woman's shoulder, with small Roman numerals above it near the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on a shoulder

Geometric · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a large mandala design tattooed over the shoulder and upper chest of a person wearing a grey top. The mandala has a central flower with layered petals, rings and dense, symmetrical detailing. The ink is black with grey shading, and the image is shot in soft indoor light with a plain background.

Geometric Botanical Shoulder Mandala Flower Roman numeral Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost came down on the first of December and stayed for eleven days. Aunt Maud had the range going before the cockerel, and I was the one sent out with the bucket to break the skin of ice on the trough. By the second week the byre window had grown its own pattern overnight, fern and feather, and Maud would stand in front of it with her thumb pressed to the glass as if she were taking a pulse.

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"Look at the petals," she said one morning, and she was right. Under the warmth of her hand the frost had begun to open from the middle outwards, rings inside rings, each edge fussy with tiny points like the trim on a good Sunday collar. "My mother drew these on every window in the house. Says it keeps the cold honest." I laughed, and she didn't. Beneath the frame she scratched a row of Roman numerals into the old wood with a hairpin, and when I asked what they were for she said, "Days I've been waiting on the wind." There were twenty-seven of them by then.

The thaw came on the twenty-eighth morning with a southerly that shook the sheets on the line like a wet rope. By breakfast the mandala was running down the glass in grey tears. Maud was too stiff to get up for the range, and I stood at the window with my palm flat on the cold pane, trying to remember which ring came after which.

I drew it myself, starting from the centre the way she had, and the glass took my breath and held it for a moment before the petals began to close. When I went through to tell her, she had her eyes shut and her thumb moving slowly on the blanket, drawing the same flower on the wool.