Black dotwork mandala tattoo with a floral centre and petal shapes on the forearm of a person wearing a white lace top.

Black mandala tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular mandala sits on the outer forearm, built from radiating petal shapes, a small flower at the centre and rings of dots. The design is rendered in black ink with fine outlines and stippled shading that gives the petals depth. The plain pale background and white lace top keep the focus on the tattoo.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Dot Circle

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

You learn the glass at Saltmarrow from old Amos Tregaskis, who tells you a lens is only honest when you can look through it at the sea and see nothing it has added. Your first months you spend blowing bottle ends that crack in the annealing oven, and you count the bubbles in each one, because Amos says a bubble is a little door the cold can leave open.

Keep reading

The winter the harbour board orders a new port light, Amos sets you to cut the prisms, eight ribbed petals of glass that must bend the lamp into a star. You grind until your fingers ache and the dust settles in the creases of your knuckles. Each night you lay the pieces along the sill and watch the gulls walk over the frost on the quay below.

The lens is finished in February. Amos seats it in its brass ring, sets a small flower of clear glass at the centre where the flame will sit, and rings the rim with studs of coloured glass, one dot for every boat that came home that year. He is too proud to say so, and you are too tired to ask him why he counted them.

On the night they light it you climb the tower alone. The beam passes out through the petals and the black water breaks into a ring of light, dotted with the boats still out past the breakwater. You stand with your palms flat against the warm brass until the last one slides into the harbour mouth and the light turns, patient, to find the next.