Watercolour mandala tattoo on a forearm, with black linework, dotwork shading and teal and magenta washes, ending in a teardrop point.

Watercolour mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A mandala-style ornament sits on the forearm, built from black outlines, white-highlighted lace-like motifs and stippled dotwork shading. Its centre and edges are filled with soft teal, blue, purple and magenta washes that fade out like watercolour. A tapering black teardrop with a fine tail extends down the arm from the base of the design.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Watercolour Teardrop Ornament Swirl Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the year the lift at Corran House stopped for good, old Maud Sillitoe carried her water up nine floors every morning in a dented tin pail, because the taps on the top landing had run dry in March. Nobody had told the council. Nobody had told anyone much of anything since the blocks were painted grey.

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On the sixth landing a boy named Tobias Quay had been painting the stairwell wall with a box of watercolour cakes his grandmother left him. He drew a circle of lace on the plaster, stippled it with the tip of a pin, and filled the middle with whatever colour the sky was that evening. Maud stopped to watch. "That's a window," she said. "It's a sky with the lid off," he said.

Each day after, she brought him a jam jar of water to wet his brush, and he gave her one teardrop of paint to take up to her flat, a blue one, which she hung on a string by the kettle. By autumn the wall had a whole ring of mandalas climbing the stairs, and the council man who came to measure for repainting stood in front of them for a long time and then went away without writing anything down.

The last thing Tobias painted was a single black drop falling from the bottom of the largest one, with a tail as fine as a hair. "Where's it going?" Maud asked. He shrugged. "Down, I suppose. Water always does." She filled his jar that afternoon and carried it up the stairs, and the tap on the top landing ran again the next morning, which she never did explain to anyone.