Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with fine linework on the top of a shoulder, set against a green and yellow leaf pattern.

Mandala tattoo on the shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A circular mandala with a central eight-pointed star, surrounded by layered rings of scalloped petals, zigzags and scrolls. Fine black outlines are combined with stippled dotwork shading that gives the centre and petal edges depth. The design is shown in black and grey on the top of a shoulder, with a thin chain necklace visible above it and a blurred stained glass style background.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Mandala Star Petal Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the village of Carrow Mill the wedding was set for the first Sunday after the harvest, and the widow Ansel Pike had promised the bride a cloth. She sat up through the long nights with a lace bobbin and a lamp, working from the centre outward, because her mother had taught her that a thing begun at the middle would hold.

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The first ring was a star of eight points, pricked out with a needle so fine the threads hardly showed. Around it she set a ring of scallops, one for each bell in the church tower, then a band of zigzags like the river running over stones below the mill. By the fourth week her fingers were stiff and her eyes watered, and she thought of leaving off the outer scrolls. Tom Hallam, the boy who carried her flour, said the cloth looked like the sun taken apart and put back together, and that was encouragement enough for one more week.

On the morning of the wedding she found the last scroll had gone wrong on one side, curling in on itself like a fern that had stopped growing. She sat with it a long time. Then she remembered the bride had asked after her every day, and that no one at the table would count the petals. She tied off the thread, folded the cloth into quarters, and carried it down the lane still warm from her lap.

At the feast it was laid on the table under the candles, and the light came through the pricked holes and threw a second star onto the linen beneath. Ansel never told anyone the flaw was there on purpose, or that she had left the scroll open so the thread could be pulled loose if the bride ever wanted a new one.