Close crop of a woman in pink satin lingerie with a black and grey ornamental mandala tattoo on the back of her hand.

Ornamental mandala tattoo on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seated on a white bed in pink satin lingerie, cropped below the face and above the knees. A black and grey ornamental design with scrolling, paisley-like motifs covers the back of her hand and reaches toward her fingers. The lighting is soft and warm, with a white watch on the wrist and a blurred plant and lamp in the background.

Hand Mandala Ornament Hand Woman

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern was due at the mill by Friday, and Ada Pell had already spoiled two sheets of squared paper by the time the gas went up in the drawing room. Mr Farrow wanted a border of paisley scrolls, each one curling in on itself like a fern that had forgotten how to open, and he wanted no two of them to touch. Touching, he said, was what made a pattern look cheap.

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She worked at the kitchen table with her left hand flat on the paper to keep it from curling, the pen moving in short, sure strokes. Her mother had taught her that a scroll should be drawn from the tip inward, the way a Kashmir weaver starts from the centre of a shawl and lets the paisley bloom outward. Her mother's pattern book sat under the teapot, its spine broken, full of borders copied from a cousin's shawl in a pawnshop window in Leicester. Ada had never seen the shawl herself.

Near midnight the scrolls began to look like they belonged to something living. She stopped trying to make them tidy and let each one lean where its neighbour leaned, until the border looked less like a drawing and more like a row of hands turned palm down, fingers curled toward the table.

Farrow took the sheet at eight without looking at it. He held it to the window, frowned at the one scroll that had run off the edge, and said it would do. Ada kept the spoiled sheets. Years later, when the mill had closed and the pattern had been sold on to a firm in Bradford, she found one in her apron pocket, the ink gone brown, and noticed the stray scroll had crept over the margin and kept going, as if it had somewhere else to be.