Woman seen from behind in a black bikini, with a grey mandala-style tattoo on her upper arm and a small tattoo on her lower back, stepping into a pool.

Mandala upper arm tattoo by a pool

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long wet blonde hair stands in a pool with her back to the camera, holding a white handrail. A detailed grey mandala-style tattoo covers her upper arm and shoulder, and a small ornamental tattoo sits on her lower back. The photograph is shot outdoors in bright sunlight with a blue pool and a glass door behind her.

Geometric Upper arm Back Mandala Woman Bikini Long hair Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had drawn the same circle for thirty winters, and every spring the damp took it back. This year the abbot sent down to the valley for a girl named Ilse, because her mother said she could hold a compass without shaking. The abbot wanted the mandala on the chapter-house wall before the snow closed the pass, a ring of petals inside a ring of gates, each gate counted by hand.

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Ilse measured the first gate and got it wrong. Anselm did not scold her. He took the cord from her, tied a knot at the length of her own arm, and told her that a circle is only a promise made in small steps. She worked until the lamp oil ran low, and the lines came out crooked, then less crooked, then true.

On the last night the brothers came in one at a time to look. Anselm stood at the back, leaning on his stick, and counted the gates with his lips moving. Ilse saw that he had lost his place somewhere near the fourth ring and was pretending otherwise. She said nothing. She set her finger on the eighth petal and walked him round the design from the centre outward, and he nodded at each gate as though he had drawn it himself.

In spring the wall was damp again, but the petals held their shape longer than they had before. Nobody in the house could say who had drawn the first ring.