Black ink mandala flash design with a radial floral pattern of petals, dots and scrollwork on a white background, suitable for a fine line or dotwork tattoo.

Black and white mandala design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala drawn in solid black linework on a white background, built from layered petals, concentric rings and scalloped borders. A central circle with radiating dashes sits inside a ring of pointed petals, with outer lobes filled with fine dots and small spirals. The image is a flat, high-contrast drawing with no shading beyond solid black fills and hatching.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Flower Petal Dot Spiral

Find an artist for this

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 Penhale kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps. Every breakfast plate in the house had the same pattern painted on it: a ring of pointed petals around a circle of dashes, and at the rim, rows of small dots and curls. Her mother had told her the pattern was left by a sailor who owed for a winter's board and could not pay in coin. He said that as long as the pattern stayed unfinished, the house would stand above the tide.

Keep reading

Years passed. Lodgers ate off the plates and never noticed the dots. Then one autumn a girl called Ruth came up from the harbour with her father, who mended nets and had no money for rooms. Ruth counted the dots on the outer lobes while the others ate. There were four hundred and eleven. She told Mrs Penhale the count was wrong, that there ought to be four hundred and twelve, and that the empty place was the one at the very centre.

Mrs Penhale said nothing for a day. That evening she took a fine brush and a pot of ink from the drawer where the bills were kept and sat by the window until the light went. In the morning she showed Ruth the centre of the plate, which had never been painted in. 'Your father can have the back room,' she said, 'if you do it neatly.'

Ruth painted the dot that night by the lamp. The tide came up Gull Steps as far as the third step and no further, the way it always had, and it stayed there. The plates are still on the dresser, stacked in a tidy row, and the house has never once been wet inside.