Close photograph of an intricate brown sunburst mandala design with scrollwork on a person's upper back shoulder, in a Geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sunburst mandala design on a shoulder

Geometric · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed circular mandala with a central sun-like disc, radiating petal and scallop bands, and curled scrollwork trailing down to the left and bottom. The design is drawn in fine, even brown lines with solid filled dots and shapes, and it sits on a warm, lightly lit shoulder against a blurred outdoor background. The brown tone suggests henna rather than permanent ink, so it may be temporary body art.

Geometric Shoulder Mandala Sunburst Scrollwork Floral motif Teardrop Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down by the radiator, love, the one that knocks, and I'll tell it once and not again. There was a lodger here the summer I was a girl, Mrs Odile Penhallow, who came off the Thursday train with one trunk and a jar of brown paste wrapped in oilcloth. Mother put her in the back room over the kitchen because it smelt of bread and nobody else would take it.

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Every morning she sat on the front step in Lamb Street and drew suns on the shoulders of women whose men were out on the boats. A ring of petals for the rays, a round disc in the middle for the sun itself, scallops for the swell of the sea, and little curled scrolls where the foam broke on the stones. It was never meant to stay. Three weeks, she said, and it would fade to the colour of stewed tea, then to nothing, the way everything out there does.

The Hollis boat was overdue that August. Mrs Hollis came to the step with her collar turned up against the wind and asked for the sun, the big one, the kind you'd only give someone you meant to wait for. Penhallow drew it slowly, dot by dot, and told her the paste would hold longer if she kept it out of the salt water. Mrs Hollis said she'd never been in salt water in her life, which was a lie, and we all knew it.

The boat came in on the twenty-second day with four men aboard, and the sun on Mrs Hollis's shoulder had gone pale at the edges, like a tide mark on wet sand. Penhallow packed her trunk that evening. Before she left she said the sun never really stays either, it only goes round, and you must learn to read the lines by their shadow. I still look for her lines on every shoulder that comes up Lamb Street. I have never once found them.