Close-up of a dark ornamental henna-style design on the back of a hand and across one finger, placed on the hand, with black nail polish.

Ornamental henna-style design on hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A dark, lace-like ornamental design covers the back of the hand, wrist and one finger, built from scrolls, dotted borders and a central mandala-like circle. The linework is fine and even, with solid dark fills at the scroll tips and a row of dots running along the finger. The design is shown in black or very dark brown on pale skin against a cobbled street, with the photo taken from above.

Hand Ornament Mandala Scroll Dot Lace pattern Henna

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top had come down in the wet at Wexcombe, and by spring the canvas was a map of holes. Mags Tully, who had sewn for the company since she was a girl, sat on an upturned crate with a needle and a spool of black thread and said nothing about it to the manager, because the manager had sold the elephant in February and had not slept properly since.

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She did not mend the holes. She picked out the frayed rim of each one and stitched a little ring of dots around it, close as pearls, then laced a scroll out from the ring toward the next tear, so that every rip had a border and every border reached for another. The village children came to watch. They said the tent looked like a grandmother's collar. Mags said it was a tent that had chosen to be ornamented rather than ashamed.

By midsummer there was one tear left, in the very middle of the roof, above the ring where the lions used to stand. Mags made a rose of concentric loops over it, with a single black dot at the heart where the centre pole went through. The crowds were thin, but they looked up. Nobody had looked up in years.

On the last night the rain held off. The manager stood at the entrance counting tickets, forty-one of them, and then he saw the light coming through the roof, the lace of shadow thrown across the sawdust like the pattern on a wrist. He took off his hat. It was, he said afterwards, the only show the company ever gave that paid him back in full.