Colour mandala tattoo on an upper arm, with red petal rings above, pale blue and grey petals below and a black and white flower centre, in a geometric style.

Red and blue mandala on the upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo is a symmetrical mandala built from layered petal shapes, with a black and white flower-like band across the centre. The top petals are solid red with pink highlights and darker red inner rings, while the lower petals are pale blue and grey with dotted accents. Bold black outlines and flat fills give it a clean, graphic look against the skin, and the photo is taken straight on with the design filling the centre of the frame.

Geometric Upper arm Mandala Flower Petal Lotus Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp room at Carrow Junction smelled of paraffin and wet wool. Walter Pryce kept the red glass and the blue glass in separate tins on the top shelf, and every evening I climbed up for them while he read the timetable aloud as if the trains might forget themselves otherwise. Red for stop, blue for the sidings, and never both on one hook, he said, because a man at a lever in fog has only his eyes and his nerve.

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Walter had a bad hip and a worse opinion of the new signal box at Hallam. He'd tap each pane with a thumbnail and listen for the chime. 'Good glass rings,' he said. 'Cheap glass just clicks.' By my twelfth winter I could tell the difference blindfold, and he had taught me to set the wicks so the flames sat level, petal by petal, in a ring around the bracket, red on the outside and blue within, so that from the footbridge the whole junction looked like something pinned to a lapel.

Walter died in March, the week the sidings were fenced off. On the last night of the old timetable I took down the tins and found a note folded under the blue lid in his square hand: Keep the middle white. I didn't understand until the 0547 came round the curve, slowing for the blue, and I saw the ring of white dots I'd painted on the iron bracket years before, the only white left in the place, holding the light steady while the red and blue opened around it.