Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on the back of a hand

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large radial mandala fills the back of a hand, with a dark centre ringed by layered petals in purple, pink and green. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the solid colour fills are flat with little shading. Other tattoos are partly visible on the forearm above, including an orange flower and a bird, set against a weathered brick background.

Traditional Geometric Hand Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Leaves Bird

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, because the wind off the canal gets into a story if you let it, and this one has enough draughts in it already. You'll have walked past the chapel on Tanner's Row a hundred times. Its round window is the one with the black heart, the one the children swear is a hole.

Keep reading

Old Walt Mossop made that window the winter of fifty-three, when the lead came in on the Tuesday cart and nobody in Harrowby had ever seen so many colours in one place. He had a girl working for him called Nell Driscoll, sixteen, with ink on her fingers and no patience for drawing a thing twice. She sketched petals in a ring, eight of them, then sixteen, then she wanted more. Walt said a window ought to hold still. Nell said the light never did.

They argued through a wet February. Walt wanted saints in blue robes; Nell wanted the petals to turn. In the end she cut the centre pane herself, a disc of black glass so dense the sun could not get through it. When Walt asked why she'd wasted good stock, she only said every flower needs somewhere to keep its seed.

The window went up on Easter morning. Walt died the summer after, and Nell kept the shop on, and when people asked what the black centre meant she gave the same answer every time. Look at the petals, she'd say, not the middle. They're lit from behind. Go on, step outside and look. You'll see the green has been waiting for you all along.