Colour neo-traditional mandala tattoo with a ring of red hearts on the upper arm near the elbow, with pink, yellow and teal petals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red hearts and mandala on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A bold mandala design sits on the back of the upper arm, with a ring of red hearts with black outlines around a bare central area of skin. Behind the hearts, layered petal shapes in pink, yellow, teal and purple radiate outwards with black linework and white highlights. The photograph is taken close up, with the wearer's light cream top visible at the edge of the frame.

Neo-trad Upper arm Mandala Heart Petal Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The panel was meant to sit over the lamp housing on the carousel, and Dilys had painted every petal before she noticed the hearts were off. Eleven red hearts ran round the ring with a gap left bare in the middle for the bulb that the council still hadn't sent from Birmingham. Ray said nobody looked that closely at a fairground at night. Dilys said she would know.

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She had learnt her letters from her father, who painted the names on the lifeboats at Margate before his hands went. All through August she worked from a stepladder with a rigger brush, mixing teal from a tin of marine enamel that stank of creosote, laying pink over yellow so the edges would glow when the low sun came across the front. The hearts she left until last. She outlined each one in black, slowly, because the sea air would have the lines off in a single season if she rushed them.

On the final Sunday of the summer, with the stalls already shuttered and gulls working the chip papers along the prom, she climbed up with the bulb in her coat pocket. She meant to fit it. Instead she sat on the top step and watched the ride turn once more with its music tinny and slow, the painted petals flickering past, the empty round of wood at the centre catching the last of the light every time it came round.

She put the bulb back in its box and left the bare patch as it was. Ray could ask her in the spring. By then she would have a better answer, or none at all.