Colour and black dotwork tattoo of a yin yang design with a lotus motif and the word Balance, on the inner forearm.

Yin yang with watercolour and mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A circular yin yang design sits on the forearm, with a soft watercolour wash in pink, yellow, blue and green on one half and black dotwork mandala patterns on the other. A lotus flower, a leaf-like motif and a small coloured dot are set within the black side, and the script word Balance curves along the lower left edge. The image is a close, straight-on photograph with even lighting and a plain background.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Yin yang Lotus Mandala Moon Dot Script Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The storm took the colour out of the moon on the east gate three nights before the midsummer fair. Master Orsolya sent me up the scaffold with a pot of ochre and a flat brush, because my hands were the steadiest in Vell and nobody else would climb in that wind.

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The gate had been painted by two hands. The black half was Ilse Harrow's, forty years of bone-pointed dots pricked into the stone until each mandala looked like frost on glass. The coloured half was her husband Tomas's, who never once kept inside a line. My grandmother used to say a scale only tells the truth when both pans weigh the same, so I assumed the trouble was simply that the colour had washed too far.

I spent the morning mixing pinks from beetroot and lime, laying the wash back where the rain had run it. Near the seam the dots blurred, so I stopped and sat with my brush dripping, looking at the small coloured dot Tomas had set inside the black lotus as a joke. Ilse had left it bare for thirty years and called it a hole. Below, the gatekeeper shouted that the fair would open without its moon, and I shouted back that a balance painted on one side is no balance at all.

So I did not repaint it. I dabbed a single drop of ochre into the black lotus, no bigger than a lentil, then climbed down before the wind rose again. By dusk the lanterns lit the whole gate, and the two halves looked like a moon that had decided to share its colour. Ilse came to the foot of the scaffold with her bone point in her fist and studied the drop for a long time. She did not say whether it was a mistake. She only went home, and the lantern-light found the drop and held it all night.