White henna-style mandala and lace-patterned designs across the back of a hand and wrist, with silver rings on the fingers.

White henna-style mandala on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand with white, henna-style ornamental designs on the back of the hand and across the wrist. The motifs include a large mandala-like floral panel with scrollwork, pointed leaves, and a lace-like band around the wrist, with smaller white bands on the fingers. The ink is white on light brown skin against a plain pink background, with several silver rings and dark nails.

Botanical Hand Forearm Mandala Floral Lotus Henna Lace pattern Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the lantern, because the lotus never liked a draught. Sit where I can see you. That's it. The winter the Brindle Cut froze solid, a widow called Orla Penn lived aboard the barge Patience with a coal stove, a one-eyed cat and a tin box of letters she would not open.

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Every morning she walked the towpath to the lock and drew on the frost with a hazel stick. Not pictures, mind. Circles inside circles, petals folding out from a middle point, and curls at the edges like the scrolls on a fiddle. The lock-keeper's boy thought she was touched. He'd sit on the gate and count the petals out loud, and she'd tell him to count the gaps between them instead, because that was where the real pattern lived.

By the thaw the drawings had run together and the path was a lace of water and mud. Orla mixed a pot of white clay, took a brush no wider than a feather, and painted that same mandala across the back of the boy's hand, a lotus at its heart and a band of lace round the wrist to keep the cold out. He wore it to school until the rain washed it away.

Years later a grey man came to the lock with a tin box of his own. Inside, on top of the letters, lay one folded sheet with nothing on it but a circle, a hazel-stick lotus, and a line in her hand: count the gaps. He stood on the gate and counted them, and then the lock gates swung open, and the water took the barge on down to the sea.