Close-up of a white ink floral mandala and paisley design across the back of a hand, fingers and wrist, extending onto the forearm.

White ink mandala and paisley on hand and wrist

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of an intricate white design on the back of a hand, with scrolling paisley shapes, a central mandala-style flower and smaller floral motifs on each finger. The fine dotted and flowing linework is pale against darker skin, and the design runs from the knuckles up over the wrist. The image is in colour, with pale pink nails and a grey and black background.

Hand Forearm Mandala Paisley Flower Scroll Leaf Henna Finger

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chair under the awning and mind the drip off the fish stall, because this is a wet tale and it has no patience for dry listeners. Down at Halewell market, on the Saturday the river came up over the cobbles, there was a woman called Oruna who sat under a sheet of oilcloth and drew on hands with a bone pen dipped in white clay. Not henna, she said. Henna stains, and a stain is a debt you cannot pay back. Her clay lifted off by the wedding night, leaving the skin as it had been, only remembered.

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Every bride in three villages came to her for the scrolls. Paisley curled like fern heads down the back of the hand, a mandala opened at the wrist, a small flower sat on each knuckle, and the leaves were lined so finely a needle could have carried them. Oruna took payment in bread and salt, never coin, and she never drew the same pattern twice. The grandmothers said her hands had learned the river, and that each design was a route the water would take off the skin.

One grey morning a man in a good coat pushed through the crowd with a purse heavy enough to swing. He wanted his bride's hands covered in something that would last, something to shame the other families. Oruna looked at the purse, then at the sky, and said the rain was coming and she would draw him a flower that would not survive it. He laughed and paid anyway.

She drew the mandala large, its petals open like a clock face. By dusk the rain had come in hard, and when the bride climbed the church steps with her hands held out, the white had run into a hundred thin rivers, carrying the flower down through her fingers and off the stone. The man stood under his umbrella and said nothing. Behind him the gutters ran pale and lacy all the way to the river, and the ducks paddled through the pattern as though they had been invited.