Black ornamental mandala tattoo covering the forearm and back of the hand of a woman in a bikini, with small lettering tattoos on her side.

Mandala tattoo on forearm and hand

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A side view of a woman in a brown bikini, with her face turned away and hair falling over her shoulder. A dense black ornamental mandala design with fine lines and dotted fill wraps from the forearm onto the back of the hand, and several small black tattoos, including lettering, sit along the ribs and waist. The image is warm-toned and bright, with natural colour in the skin and the bikini, and the tattoos are entirely black ink.

Blackwork Forearm Hand Ribs Mandala Ornament Lettering Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lace pattern would not settle, so Ada Pryce took her pins out one by one and laid them on the oilcloth in a ring. Every pin she set down, the ring grew another petal. By the third Sunday the table looked like the inside of a clock, and her husband Frank, who mended the church bells, asked her plainly whether she meant to sleep at it.

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She told him the design had come to her in the night, a circle folding inward on itself, dotted at every join so the eye had somewhere to rest. The lace mill in Thornbury had sent its book of patterns, and none of them had a centre. Ada worked the dots with the finest thread she owned, a grey linen the colour of wet slate, and it took her eleven days to make a piece no wider than a saucer.

When the mill foreman came up from the valley he turned the lace over in his fingers and said it was too fine to sell to anyone who wore gloves. Ada said it was not for gloves. She pressed the piece flat against the back of his left hand, the way a seal is pressed into wax, and when she lifted it the lines had gone under his skin like ink into blotting paper. He sold lace in Thornbury for thirty years after and never once let a customer see that hand bare.

On the first hard frost he pulled his cuff back to warm his knuckles and found the dots had kept their places. On the back of his hand a small grey ring was turning slowly, as though someone on the far side of the valley were still counting pins.