Black and grey dotwork rose with a mandala style frame and hanging drops on a forearm, shown against denim and patterned wallpaper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose and mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rose forms the centre of the design, with its petals shaded in fine stippled dots and defined by clean outlines. Ornamental leaves and scrollwork frame the flower, and thin chains ending in drops hang beneath it. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey and sits on a forearm against a blue acid wash denim background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Rose Mandala Scrollwork Chain Drop Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum's hands were still wet from the brine tub when she spread the paper across the kitchen table. The drawing was a rose the size of a dinner plate, its petals shaded in a fog of tiny dots, with leaves curling round it like the lace on a Sunday cloth. Beneath it hung a line of thin chains, each one ending in a single bead of ink that looked ready to drip onto the oilcloth. She said it was for the Fidelity, and that Dad had been asking for it since the spring.

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The Fidelity had gone out of Lowestoft on a Monday tide with eleven men aboard and come back short by one. Dad never spoke about the night the net fouled and the warp took Ray Costello over the rail, but he kept the old brass compass in his coat and rang the harbour office every week about the chart of the grounds. Mum had spent most of that week deciding what to draw. She reckoned a compass needs a centre, and the rose was the only thing she knew that always pointed back to the same place.

When the design was finished, Dad carried it out to the boat folded in his breast pocket and pinned it to the wheelhouse wall beside the barometer. Nobody mentioned the beads at the bottom of the chains, though every one of us counted them. Eleven. The twelfth chain was shorter than the rest, and it stopped on the paper just where the drops began to fall.

On the Monday the Fidelity went out again, and I stood on the wall until the tide carried her past the pier light. The rose was still pinned somewhere inside her, facing the way she had come.