Black ink mandala drawing on white paper, with layered petals, dotted centre and a small eye motif, shown as a geometric tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ink mandala design on paper

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala drawn in black ink on white paper, built from layered petal shapes radiating from a central flower. The centre has a dotted, scalloped bloom around a small ringed motif, and the outer petals are edged with fine hatching and small teardrop shapes. The design is shown flat and centred against a plain background, with a slight shadow at the edges of the sheet.

Geometric Botanical Mandala Flower Petal Eye Teardrop Pattern

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

No, sit closer, the wind off the moor takes half of it if you sit by the gate. Where was I? Ah, the window. Every abbey worth its name has a round window over the altar, and this one had a rose of stone so fine the masons said God had drawn it first in the dust and they had only to cut the lines. The Abbot's nephew, Tomas Garrow, could never look at it for long. He said the middle of it was an eye that kept watching him from the wall.

Keep reading

Now the sacristan's daughter, Ilse, knew that rose better than any man. She swept beneath it every Saturday with a goose wing, and she counted its petals the way other girls counted their fathers' debts. Twelve great petals, and between them smaller ones, and between those a hatched edge like the barbs of a feather. Round the outside ran a ring of drops, and when the rain came in sideways off the sea, it ran through them and dripped onto the pews.

Tomas came to her one winter night with a lantern and a question. The frost had cracked the stone, and the abbey would fall by spring unless someone climbed out along the roof beam and measured the damage. He wanted her to hold the rope. She held it. He went out over the dark with the wind shouting in his coat, and when he came back white to the lips he would say only, "The eye in the middle is not carved. It is a hole, and there is a light behind it."

Ilse said nothing. She went up the stair herself the next morning, sat on the beam with her skirts tucked round her knees, and looked at the ring of drops for a long time. Then she climbed down, found a scrap of yellow glass from the chapel's broken lamp, and set it into the hollow with lead and her own spit. Every morning after, the sun came through that small yellow eye and lay on the flagstones, and the sacristan's girl swept it out of the nave with her goose wing. Now, the bread. Mind the step, it's loose.