Ornamental design on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A woman takes a mirror selfie holding a phone, with a dark ornamental design visible on the back of her hand and wrist. The design appears to be a mandala-like motif with fine detail, shown in black or dark tones. The cropped composition shows her torso, grey t-shirt, black ripped jeans and gold jewellery against a light room.

Hand Mandala

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

Ada had cut glass for eleven winters at the works above Harrow Point, and her father still checked every ring of the lens against his own pencil drawing before he would let the prisms go to the lighthouse crew. The design was a mandala of sorts, he called it, though the lamplighters called it the spider: concentric rings of tiny prisms, each angled so a single flame in the middle could be thrown out to sea as a steady bar of light. Ada could not sleep on the nights before a casting, so she kept the pattern inked on a strip of card pinned inside her apron, ring by ring, until the card was soft as cloth from handling.

Keep reading

Her father found her at the bench one morning with the card pinned to the cutting table. "The sea doesn't read your drawings," he said. "It reads the angle." She showed him that every facet had come out true, that the rings matched the pencil to a hair. He grumbled and bent to the magnifier anyway, and she saw his jaw loosen, which in him was praise.

The lens went out on the supply boat in March, wrapped in straw and oilcloth. Ada never saw it lit. Eight months later a fisherman's letter arrived at the works, short and smudged with salt: the light had held through the gale that took the Cornish herring fleet, and he had counted the rings from his deck as the beam swept over him, every one of them whole.