Black and grey botanical mandala tattoo with petal-like shapes on a woman's upper chest, worn with a gold chain necklace.

Black and grey mandala on chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a symmetrical mandala with layered petal and leaf shapes radiating from a central point. It is rendered in black and grey with soft shading and fine outlines. It sits on the upper chest beneath a plunging black top and a gold chain necklace, and the photo is cropped below the neck so no face is shown.

Botanical Geometric Chest Mandala Lotus Flower Petal Necklace Pendant

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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

Mrs Ada Pell had been told by three different foremen that a pattern could not be drawn from the centre outwards, and she had drawn every one of them from the centre outwards anyway, because that was where the mistakes were easiest to see. On the lace floor in Radford the frames ran all night, a sound like rain on a tin roof, and Ada worked at a sloped desk under a lamp with a brass shade gone green at the seams.

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The commission came in October from a dressmaker in Mayfair who wanted a single motif repeated across a bridal veil, nine petals to a ring, leaves tucked between them like folded hands. Ada sat with a sheet of squared paper and a pencil worn to a stub. She drew the first petal and then the second, counting under her breath, and by two in the morning she had a flower the size of a saucer, perfectly balanced, every leaf answering its opposite across the middle.

Her nephew Tom came up the stairs at half past two with tea he had scalded on the stove. He looked over her shoulder and said it looked like a window someone had left open. She didn't ask what he meant. She knew. Light went through the gaps in a lace pattern and fell on whatever lay beneath, and the gaps were the design as much as the thread was.

Ada pinned the drawing to the board before dawn. When the mill whistle went she lifted the sheet, folded it once along the centre line, and held it up to the window. The two halves matched exactly. She laid it flat on the desk and, for the first time that month, let herself put the pencil down.