Photograph of a forearm tattoo with a white ink mandala pattern and a small black spider near the wrist, set against a lace background.

White mandala and black spider on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hand and forearm are shown with a white ink mandala or paisley-style ornament extending from the wrist towards the elbow. A small black spider with curling legs sits within the lower part of the pattern. The white linework is fine and lightly raised against the skin, the spider is solid black, and the pale lace background contrasts softly with the arm.

Forearm Mandala Paisley Spider Ornament White ink

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had the pattern pricked onto card before the mill closed for the Whitsun week, and she kept the card in the drawer beside her mother's thimble. Nobody in Holmfirth made bobbin lace any more. The design was a paisley thing, a teardrop opening into petals, and the only thing she had ever drawn better than it was a spider. Her uncle said spiders were bad luck in a lace room. He said it every spring, and every spring a spider returned to the corner above the bobbin winders and sat there like a foreman.

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She worked the mandala into the cuff of a christening shawl for the vicar's daughter, bobbin after bobbin, the pins clicking on the pillow like a clock that could not settle on the hour. The thread was as fine as breath. By November her fingers knew the pattern better than her head did, and she could go whole evenings without looking down. The spider watched from the beam. It never spun a web in the room, which struck her as odd, since the room was full of threads.

On the last night before the shawl went to the post, she found the spider had walked down the pillow and settled in the middle of the finished border, legs curled as if it were trying to read the lace. She did not brush it off. She took up her needle and worked one dark knot beside it, a small black stitch in all that white, and then she wrote on the back of the pattern card: finished, with a spider. The vicar's wife never noticed. Ada did, every time she unfolded the shawl.