A white ink mandala and lotus design on the back of a hand, with silver rings and white nails, in a botanical and geometric style on the hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White mandala and lotus on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests on a grey and black plaid blanket, showing a white mandala and a lotus flower design across the back of the hand and towards the wrist. The linework is fine and symmetrical, with the petals and rings of the mandala built from dotted and solid strokes. The design is the only colour on the skin, and the rest of the image is in whites, greys and silver tones from the rings and nails.

Botanical Geometric Hand Mandala Lotus Flower Ornament Hand

Find an artist for this

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

Sit nearer the stove, the lot of you, because the wind off the Channel gets into a story if you leave it out in the passage. You'll remember Marjorie Penhale, who kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Row. Every Sunday she sat at the kitchen table with a saucer of chalk mixed with the white of a boiled egg, and she drew on the back of her hand, starting at the wrist and working out to the knuckles. Lotus first, always, then the mandala round it, ring inside ring, dotted and then solid, so that by the time the bread was rising she had a flower that looked like frost on a window.

Keep reading

The lodgers thought she was vain. Mr Ashdown, who sold insurance and never paid on time, said so loudly at breakfast. Marjorie only smiled and held out her hand for the marmalade. Then one February a silversmith named Tobias Quill came up from the harbour with a box of rings he had beaten out of old spoons. He fitted one to each finger without asking, and she let him, and he said the silver would stop the chalk smudging on the wash line. It did not stop anything from the sea.

In March the spring tide came up Gull Row and into the cellar, and the chalk ran off her hands in grey threads that went down the drain with the rest of the flood. Mr Ashdown stood in the doorway in his wellingtons, complaining about the damp in his ledgers. Tobias came up the hill with a lamp and found Marjorie on the stairs, the rings still on, her palms bare and pink from scrubbing.

Nobody can say what she did next, though the story goes that she drew the lotus again that night in ink, and that the rings left a pale tidemark where the petals met. Ask the boarding house for a room with a view of the harbour and they will tell you it is still there. Make of that what you like.