Two side-by-side photographs of dotwork hand tattoos on a lower leg: the left with a lace-like wrist mandala over green leaves, the right holding red freesia with crystals and moon symbols.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two hands with flowers and crystals on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Mixed · Photo

The image shows two diptych photographs of hand tattoos on a lower leg. The left hand has fine dotwork shading, a lace-like mandala at the wrist, and teal leaves at the base, while the right hand holds red freesia blooms and has crystal points, a moon symbol and red linework on the fingers and palm. Black stippled shading combines with teal, green, red and orange colour, and each piece is framed closely against the skin.

Dotwork Botanical Calf Hand Flower Crystal Mandala Moon Leaves Lace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The freesias came up in the glasshouse the week the boat stopped running for good, which my mother said was the island being contrary, as it always was. We had planted cream bulbs in October from a seed merchant in Tarbrae who had sent the wrong order twice, and somehow what came through the soil was red, a hard, stubborn red nobody had asked for. My sister Morag stood in the doorway with her bag already packed and said they looked like something bleeding out of a tin.

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Gran kept her quartz on the windowsill in a jam jar, points she had carried up from the shore one by one and never sold. Before the tide turned she used to draw a small crescent moon on the back of her hand in biro, the way other women checked the sky for rain. After the funeral Mum found the jar half full and cried over it, and then sent Morag to the mainland with the good suitcase and a list of addresses that began and ended with the same bus stop.

On the last morning the ferry sounded its horn twice from the bay. I cut every red stem I could reach and wrapped them in newspaper that still smelled of peat and diesel. Morag was waiting at the slipway with her collar up against the wind, and she looked at the bundle as if I might be giving her a funeral wreath. I put the freesias in her hand anyway. She closed her fingers round the stems, the way you hold something you intend to bring back, and the first drops of rain ticked off the crystals in the jar I had tucked under my arm.