Black and grey mandala tattoo with dotwork shading and scroll-filled petals, placed on the outer forearm.

Black mandala tattoo on an forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala covers the forearm, built from concentric rings of teardrop petals, scrolled motifs and radiating lotus-like shapes. Solid black linework outlines the bold petals while dense stippled dotwork fills the shading between them. The image is entirely black and grey, with the design centred and the soft blurred background adding depth to the composition.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Petal Scroll Lotus Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the eleventh landing of Ashgrove House, where the lift had been broken since the spring, an old woman named Nell Harrowby kept a tin of chalk and a bucket of water. Each evening the wind climbed the stairwell from the car park, rattling the doors and whistling through the gaps, and each evening she knelt on the concrete and drew a circle. She started with a single dot in the middle, then a ring of petals, then a ring of scrolls, then another ring of petals, until the landing was covered and the wind had to go round.

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The children on the estate said the wind was a man who lived under the bins and wanted to be let in. Nell said he was only lonely and needed something to look at. She taught the boy from flat forty-two to place his dots so that no two of them touched, because a dot that touched another was a door left open. He was slow and careful, and his tongue poked out the side of his mouth while he worked.

One winter the council sent men to paint the stairwell grey. They scrubbed the chalk away with wire brushes, and that night the wind came roaring up from the car park and found every door in the block. Nell was in bed with a fever. The boy went up alone with a biro and drew the lotus at the centre of the landing, petal by petal, pressing so hard the paper tore. When he finished, the wind reached the threshold, stopped, and sat down like a dog at a gate.

The men painted over the stairwell twice more. The pattern still came through the paint, a faint ring of petals on every landing, and the wind has never once climbed past the eleventh floor since.