Black floral mandala tattoo with paisley swirls across the back of a hand, worn alongside several silver rings and white nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black floral mandala on the back of a hand

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand rests against bare skin with a dense black design across the back, centred on a flower-like mandala with layered petals and fine dotted detailing. Paisley-style swirls and curling scrolls extend down towards the wrist and fingers. The design is rendered in solid black with no colour, and the image is shot close and sharp against a dark fabric edge.

Botanical Hand Mandala Paisley Flower Scroll Swirl

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

The lace came off the loom in the last grey hour before the fishing boats went out, and Maren Ashdown was the only one in Cullery Row who still checked every knot against the pattern book. Her grandmother had kept the book in a tin with a broken hinge, and its pages smelled of camphor and cold tea. The design on the third sheet was a flower that had no proper name, only a number in faded ink, and it was the one Maren had never managed to finish.

Keep reading

She had tried it a dozen times on cheap calico, always going wrong at the centre where the petals folded back on themselves like a clenched fist. Her cousin Tobias, who mended nets on the slip and laughed at her hobby, said it was a sea-urchin and she should give up. Maren said nothing. She only tightened the bobbins and worked the centre again, counting under her breath, the way her grandmother had taught her to count the tide.

On the morning the Kestrel failed to come back past the breakwater, Maren sat at the loom with the tin open and began the flower from the middle outwards. By noon the scrolls ran down the edge of the cloth like the wake of a boat, and the dotted detail she had always lost came out clean as frost. When the fishermen's wives came up the lane to ask after their men, she held the finished piece up to the window, and the light came through every hole in the pattern at once.