Close view of a hand with a white ink mandala design across the back of the hand and wrist, worn with silver rings and black matte nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White mandala design on the back of a hand

Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests across a bare leg, showing a white ink mandala design with floral and geometric motifs spreading over the back of the hand and down towards the wrist. The linework is fine and symmetrical, and the pale ink stands out against the skin tone. Several silver rings, including a lotus-style ring, sit on the fingers, and the background shows a white fur rug and a black high-heeled shoe.

Hand Mandala Floral motif White ink Lotus High heel

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

The lock at Thornbury Cut kept the river in its place, and Mabel Cragg kept the lock. Every spring the barges came up from Gloucester loaded with coal and cider, and every spring the canal wanted one of them back. That was the old arrangement, her mother said, and nobody had ever found the paperwork to end it.

Keep reading

Mabel's grandmother had painted the lock-gate pillars with lime wash, cut in rings and petals that spread like a lotus opening on still water. She said the water read patterns the way a tired man reads a hymn sheet, slowly, and forgave the mistakes. So when the Ada Rose came in low and listing, its skipper, a silent man called Tobin Hale, asked Mabel for the same white pattern on his hull.

She worked through the night with a stiff brush and a jar of slaked lime mixed with milk, tracing a mandala over the boards, petal inside petal, with a small hooked line at each corner to stop the current pulling the edges apart. Tobin watched from the towpath with his hands in his coat pockets. By dawn the paint had dried to the colour of old bone, and the barge slid through the gate without touching a single timber.

Years later Tobin came back up the cut with his granddaughter, who pointed at the faded rings on the pillars and asked who had drawn them. He told her the water had been paying its debt in patience, and that the lotus only opened for people who kept their hands steady. Mabel was long dead by then, but the petals were still there, going grey at the edges and holding.