Reddish-brown paisley and floral mandala design on the palm of a hand, shown in a close photograph.

Paisley floral design on a palm

Hand · Colour · Photo

A reddish-brown ornamental design sits on the centre of an open palm. It combines a paisley-like outer border with a layered floral centre, built from fine outlined petals and leaf shapes. The single warm, brownish-red tone is set against pale skin on a blurred wooden background.

Hand Paisley Flower Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The madder dye had soaked into the floorboards of the loft long before you arrived, so the whole room smelled of earth and iron, and nobody in Garrow Bridge noticed it any more. Mr Corrigan had laid the shawl across your knees that morning, its border gone soft at the fold, and told you to copy the design before the widow who owned it came back on Saturday for her things.

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Paper was dear, and the card for the Jacquard cutters was dearer, so you worked with what you had. You mixed a little of the red paste in a saucer and, after your third clumsy leaf, dipped the nib of your pen and drew straight onto the heel of your palm. The paisley swung round like a teardrop with its tail curled back, and inside it a rose opened in rings, every petal outlined twice so the light could pass between the lines. It took the whole afternoon, and by the end your hand looked like something a fortune teller might have read.

Mr Corrigan came up the ladder with his tea and stopped at the top rung. He looked at the shawl, then at your hand, and said the stain would last a week if you were lucky and didn't scrub. "Then you'd better get the rest of it down," he said, "because the loom doesn't care where a pattern was first drawn. It will read those holes a thousand times over."

By Saturday the red had faded to the colour of weak tea, but the rose still showed in the lines of your skin when you held your hand to the window. The widow took her shawl without looking at your hand at all. On Monday you stood under the great frame and listened to the first punched card clatter through, and that same paisley came up in dark thread across a length of cloth bound for a shop you would never see.