Black and grey dotwork tattoo of paisley, mandala and floral motifs running from the upper arm across the elbow.

Paisley and mandala tattoo on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A sleeve-style tattoo of paisley shapes, a central mandala flower, leaf forms and a lotus-like bud, running from the upper arm down past the elbow. The linework is fine and dark, with stippled dotwork shading filling the petals and the ornamental panels. The piece is entirely black and grey against a plain dark background, and the skin tone and peach top are visible at the edges of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Forearm Paisley Mandala Flower Lotus Leaf Ornament Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret Kerr had the pattern card in her lap before the last bell rang, and she kept her thumb on its corner the way her mother had kept a hand on a hot kettle lid. The card was the colour of weak tea, pierced with a thousand small holes, and each hole was a dot the loom would read as a dark thread. Nobody else on the night shift touched the Jacquard cards after eleven. That was Ewan's job, and Ewan had gone home with a fever and a cough like wet paper.

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Outside the window the Cart ran black beneath the Albert Bridge, and the gas lamps on the far bank laid long yellow stitches across it. Somewhere up Renfrew Street a tram groaned to a stop. Her task was to check the lotus bud at the head of the border, the one that had come up from the drawing office with a kink in its spine. Hugh Lyle had drawn it with a fine nib, and every petal had been stippled with dots no bigger than grains of sand.

She found the fault at a quarter to two. One hole had been punched out of line, so the leaf beneath the bud would weave as a blank patch. It was a small thing. Nobody on the floor would have noticed. But she had spent eleven years learning that the cloth always remembers the one dot that is wrong.

She took the awl and corrected it by hand, the way Hugh had once shown her with a needle and a candle. When she held the card to the window, the mandala sat whole, its rings closing like a clock that had finally agreed with itself. Across the river the lamps kept burning as if nothing had happened.