Black and grey mandala tattoo on a forearm beside an overhead view of a breakfast bowl, mug of tea and spoon.

Black mandala tattoo on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

An overhead photograph of a breakfast bowl topped with banana slices, raspberries, blackberries, strawberries and granola, next to a mug of tea and a spoon. In the bottom right, a forearm shows a large black mandala tattoo with fine radiating linework, petal-like shapes and dotted shading. The tattoo is in black ink on pale skin, and the table surface is plain white.

Geometric Forearm Mandala Blackberry Strawberry Tea

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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

The boats were already in when Nell Garside pushed open the café door at six, and the bowls were still stacked wet on the drainer. She had learned to lay out the fruit before the light came up over the breakwater: bananas in rounds like coins, raspberries in a red scatter, blackberries picked from the hedge behind the chandlery, strawberries cut into points so they sat up straight.

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Her father had drawn circles on everything. On the back of ferry timetables, on the steamed-up window, on the paper lining of fish crates. He said a circle that turned into itself was the only honest shape, because it had no corner to hide in. When he died she found a compass case in the drawer under the till, the points worn blunt, and a single sheet folded into eight with a pattern drawn in pencil, petals opening out from a dotted centre.

The customer that morning was a man off the night ferry, grey at the temples, who asked for granola with no sugar and tea without milk, then sat staring at the table until his tea went cold. He had a drawing of his own in his coat pocket, he said, of a rope knot his sister had shown him once. Nell unfolded her father's sheet and laid it beside his. The two patterns, one all loops and one all petals, turned out to be the same pattern drawn from opposite ends.

He left a pound under the saucer and took the sheet with him, folded in eight. Nell rinsed the compass, dried it, and put it back in the drawer where it belonged. Outside, the first gulls were working the fish waste, and the tea in her own mug had a teabag still bobbing at the rim, going brown in the middle, the way it always did when she forgot it.