Black and grey traditional tattoo of a woman's face with a bindi and ornate headdress, surrounded by a mandala, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate woman portrait with mandala on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face in profile, with flowing hair, a bindi and a jewelled headdress, is set within a large ornamental mandala. Smaller faces appear at the lower edge of the design. The work uses bold outlines, solid black areas and smooth grey shading on the skin tones, and it is shown in black and grey only.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been filing the same silver petal for an hour when the bell over the workshop door rang and Mr Okafor came in out of the drizzle with a shoebox under his arm. He set it on the bench between her loupe and a tin of pumice without asking. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was a cracked brass plate the size of a side plate, engraved with a ring of lotus petals around a face that years of handling had worn smooth.

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"My mother's," he said. "It was her grandmother's. The clasp went at the wedding and nobody has been brave enough to touch it since."

Nell turned it under the lamp. The face had worn down to a suggestion: a brow, a closed mouth, a dot where a bindi had once been struck. Around the rim, tiny faces peeked from between the petals, five of them, each no bigger than a thumbnail. She counted them twice before she understood they were the children and cousins, added by someone who wanted the family kept close to whoever held the plate.

She promised nothing. She took the shoebox home that night and worked until two in the morning with a piercing saw and a magnifier, cutting the crack clean and drawing the lost brow back in with a fine punch. When she finished, the face looked up at her as if it had only been waiting for someone to stop shouting over it.

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