Symmetrical mandala tattoo on the chest

Tobias Quill was a sign-painter from Margate, and he had the steadiest hand on the Kent coast until a scaffold board gave way under him one wet March. After that his fingers shook like a moth in a jar. He could not draw a line any more, so he pricked dots instead, one to a breath, with a darning needle dipped in Indian ink. Every dot took the length of an in-breath and an out-breath, and he never once hurried, because hurrying made the hand shake worse. It took him three winters to finish the centre panel for Ada Vane's carousel: a lotus opening into a medallion, petal inside petal, all of it built from dots so small you had to hold your breath to see them.

Ada was not a patient woman. She wanted the panel fixed to the centre post by the Whitsun fair, so she told him to hurry, and when he would not, she tossed his drawing on the stove. He had kept a tracing folded in the lining of his coat, though, and he pinned it up again that same night and started over from the middle outwards.

The panel never turned after that. It sat fixed and still while the horses went round, and people said it was just a painted board. Then one evening a girl with a cough sat on the grey horse and counted the dots aloud, one breath at a time, the way Tobias had counted them. Somewhere around the four-hundredth, the medallion gave a small creak and began to turn with her.

So if you ever hear the horses counting when the lamps go out, don't you dare go and check.