Black and grey dotwork tattoo of an alien head inside a circular flower of life mandala on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Alien head within a flower of life mandala

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large alien head with almond-shaped eyes sits at the centre of a circular design built from overlapping flower of life circles. The head is shaded with fine stippled dotwork, with solid black eyes and a bold border of repeating triangular geometric patterns. The tattoo is rendered entirely in black and grey ink against plain skin and a light fabric background.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Alien Flower of life Mandala Sacred geometry Geometric pattern

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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

Your neighbour's boy comes up the lane on the Tuesday with a brown paper parcel under his arm and oil on his cheek, and you know what it is before you open it. You are the only one in Pell Hollow who still grinds mirrors to a true curve, and the letter tucked inside the wrapping is from a man in Dayton you have never met. He wants a lens ground to match a drawing. The drawing is of a face.

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The face is grey and wide-eyed, almond-shaped, with a small mouth closed like a purse. Around it, circles overlap until they make a flower, and the flower repeats outward until it becomes a ring of triangles. He has used a compass, you can see where the point stabbed the paper at the centre. He writes that the face has come to him in dreams for a month, and that the circles are how it tells him it is patient. You do not reply. You take the drawing to the kitchen table and trace the rings with your thumbnail until the lamp burns low.

Working the glass through the nights, you begin to hear Pell Hollow differently: the hum in the telegraph wires, the dog on Fenner Road, the clock at the depot that is always four minutes slow. Your hands learn the curve before your head does. By the third night you understand that the flower was never a pattern for the lens. It is a map of where the lens must point, and the grinding stops making sense until you put your eye to the finished disc and find the sky already waiting inside it.

On Friday you post it back with no return address. The following spring the boy writes to say his uncle's barn roof has a patch of stippled light on it every dusk, perfectly round, and that the postmaster has taken to leaving the back door unlocked. You sign your reply with a single dot.