Black and grey dotwork and linework floral mandala tattoo running down a person's upper arm, with a white tank top and black scarf in view.

Black and grey floral mandala on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large floral design with a central five-petalled flower and layered leaves, with paisley-like swirls and lace-style edging above and below. The fine linework is filled with dense stippled dotwork that builds soft shading across the petals and leaves. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, filling the length of the upper arm, with a plain white wall behind the subject.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Flower Leaf Paisley Mandala Swirl Petal

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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

Dearest Ottilie, the shawl is finished and I have not slept since Tuesday, so forgive the smudges. You will laugh, but I counted the dots again last night. Every petal of the five-leafed bloom is filled with them, six thousand give or take, and the pricking tool blunted twice before the edging at the hem was done. Master Hollin says a pattern like this is a sermon written in pins, and he is never wrong about sermons.

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The design came from the chest your grandmother left me, the one with the cracked lid and the paper folded inside it. There were forty sheets, each one a flower drawn in brown ink, and the same curled swirl at the corners, like a fern-head unrolling in the morning. Nobody in Caddow Vale knows where the drawings were made. The paper is the thick grey stock they sold in Ostrey before the harbour flooded, and the hand is not my grandmother's. I traced the fifth sheet onto muslin with a candle behind it, and the lines came up as if they had been waiting.

The bride will wear it over her shoulder on the hill road, where the wind comes straight off the salt flats. I told her it would keep the cold out, which is true, and that the dots would soften as the light went, which is also true. I did not tell her that the dots are the part you must stitch slowest, or that my fingers went numb on the lower leaves and I had to rest with the work in my lap for an hour.

Last thing: I found a name pricked into the hem, very small, in the same stipple. Ada. I have not decided whether to pick it out. You know me. I think I will leave it, and let the wind decide who reads it.