Gold and blue metallic ornamental designs on a forearm and the back of a hand, with bangles and rings worn alongside.

Metallic ornamental designs on forearm and hand

Forearm · Colour · Photo

Metallic gold and blue ornamental designs cover a forearm and the back of a hand, including a mandala-like motif, a scrolled floral panel and a row of small dots along a finger. The linework is clean and symmetrical, with blue fills and gold outlines against sun-tanned skin. The background is a sandy beach with rocks, and the wearer also has rings and a cuff.

Forearm Hand Mandala Ornamental Floral Scroll Dot Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern book had gone soft at the corners by the time Ines carried it down to the quay. Her uncle had cut every page by lamplight, each star and scallop pricked through with a bradawl so the gold leaf could be dabbed across the holes. Forty years of brides and ship's chandlers had worn those lines thin, and she knew them the way she knew the cracks in her own knuckles.

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The Sofia Halden was due on the evening tide, and her master had sent word that he wanted the cabin panels finished before she sailed for Lisbon. Ines had never stood on a deck. She had only ever watched the sea from the harbour wall, where the boats came in grey and went out bright, and she had never once wondered what the water looked like from underneath.

In the last pages of the book she found a mandala her uncle had inked in blue and never finished. Beneath it, in his cramped hand, he had written: for the girl who leaves. She traced the petals with her thumb, then cut the design into the oiled sheet and worked the enamel through, one dot at a time, until the panel shone like a lantern under the cabin lamp.

The master came aboard at dusk, looked at the work for a long while, and asked who had cut it. Her uncle, she said. He nodded slowly and said the sea would wear it down soon enough. As the ship cleared the breakwater, Ines stood at the rail and watched the light catch the gold dots on the water, one after another, until the wake closed over them and the book was all she had left of the pattern.