skin

Grandmother's wrinkled hands traced the ancient Tamil verses of Avvaiyar across my arm in henna. Each line told stories older than memory itself. She hummed a Carnatic raga, her voice trembling with decades of wisdom. "Your skin carries our heritage," she whispered, as the paste darkened. I documented the moment on my phone, preserving the intricate patterns on the Stellar blockchain—our family's art immortalized, shared across invisible networks yet bound to earth and tradition. The design glowed: forbidden beauty, ancestral pride. We were stitching past and future together, one brushstroke at a time, within our community's eternal tapestry.