Neo-traditional tattoo of a teal and orange mandala-style flower surrounded by brown and green leaves on the upper arm.

Teal mandala flower with leaves on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large central flower with a layered mandala-like centre, set on a pale grey-blue petal shape with teal and orange outer petals. Brown and olive leaves with dark veins fan out around the flower and extend beyond its outline. Bold black outlines and smooth colour fills dominate, with soft shading on the leaves and petals.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Flower Mandala Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The vats had been stirring since before light, and Ione had already lost the argument with her father about the blue. He wanted cloth the colour of murex, a purple that would make the magistrates at the harbour gate turn their heads. She wanted the colour of the pool behind the fig grove, grey-blue where the shade lay and green where the reeds leaned in.

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She had taken a handful of woad from the northern cart, bruised a saffron root in a bowl and sat cross-legged on the courtyard flags with a cup of water going cold beside her. On the back of a broken amphora she drew what she could not dye: a flower with a heart like a sea urchin, petals stacked one inside another, and leaves that ran off the edge of the clay as if they had somewhere else to be.

Her father found her there at noon. He turned the sherd over in his stained fingers for a long time, then went to the vats without a word. When he came back he carried the bolt of linen she had been told to ruin. It was already striped in green and burnt orange, with pale grey petals laid down where the wool had drunk the least dye.

By the next market the bolt had sold before the awnings were up. A potter from Tyre asked her to paint the same flower on his jars, and Ione took the commission with a wet brush, the dye still rimming her nails like a bruise that would not fade.