Close-up of a black dotwork and linework mandala tattoo with leaves and a central geometric flower on a person's thigh, with a mustard skirt and bare feet in view.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black mandala tattoo on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A bare thigh carries a large black mandala with concentric rings, stylised leaves and a central geometric flower motif, extending down toward the knee. The design uses fine outlines combined with stippled dots for shading, and the piece is entirely black and grey. The leg is shown in a seated pose against a brick path, with a hand resting at the top of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Thigh Mandala Flower Leaves Geometric pattern 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

Bethany had the pricking card flat under the lamp when the bell over the scullery door gave its two dull knocks, the way it always did when the lane flooded. Outside, the lane was a river of wet slate. She did not get up. Mum's pattern lay across the oilcloth between the teapot and the sugar bowl, and it had taken her three evenings to find the centre.

Keep reading

It was a round thing, a rosette of rings within rings, each band stippled with pin pricks so close they read as shadow. Leaves crept out from the rim as though someone had breathed on the paper and frost had followed. In the middle sat a flower of overlapping circles, six petals drawn from a single seed, the same flower Mum had worked into every christening shawl in the parish for forty years. Nobody could say where she had learned it. She always said it had been there before her.

Bethany pulled the lamp closer and counted the holes. Forty-one in the outer band, forty-one in the next. Mum had numbered the rings in pencil, tiny and slanted, and at the very edge, in a hand gone unsteady, she had written: Start from the middle. Nothing else.

The bell knocked again. Bethany took a fresh pin from the tin, set its point to the first dot at the heart of the flower, and pressed until the card gave way with the faintest sigh.