Black line drawing of a geometric mandala with a script title reading Transformation and a paragraph of text beside it, shown as a flash design rather than a tattoo on skin.

Transformation mandala design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black line design of a mandala sits on the left, with a ring of small star shapes around a spiral of petal-like blades and a dot at the centre. A faint pentagram outline runs behind it, and the word Transformation appears above in a flowing script. Three paragraphs of justified text sit on the right, set in a simple sans serif on a white background.

Geometric Mandala Star Pentagram Script lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, the teapot's gone cold and the bride's mother will be wanting her chairs back, so sit close and keep your hands in your lap. My nan, Edith Pilling, was sixteen the summer a snake came up out of the flour bins at the mill in Calder Row. She did not scream. She had a wooden spoon in her hand and it seemed rude to drop it.

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The creature was longer than the bakehouse table and warm as new bread, and it had crept in through a crack in the wall to find the oven. Edith sat on an upturned crate and watched it coil round the brick, and while she watched, it began to shed. It started at the head, the old skin loosening like a stocking pulled down over a heel, and it came away whole, every scale of it, a pale ghost lying in the flour. Underneath, the new one shone like fresh tar. Edith always said it was the most frightening and most sensible thing she had ever seen.

The mill owner's son had asked for her hand that spring, and she had spent a month refusing him in her head, wearing the same grey frock to do it. That evening she carried the frock to the oven and fed it to the flames, and the snake, if you believe her, watched with its tongue flickering in approval. She put on her mother's blue wool instead, stepped out of the old life in one movement, and married Harold Pilling in October under a sky as clear as glass.

At the reception somebody found a papery skin folded beneath the hymn board. Harold picked it up, looked at Edith across the room, and tucked it into the pocket of his best coat without a word. He never once asked her what it was, and she never once asked him to give it back. Now go and fetch your coat, the fiddler is tuning up.