Black dotwork mandala tattoo on the inner wrist and forearm, shown from the side and from the palm side.

Black mandala tattoo on the inner wrist

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala with a central rosette, petal shapes, scrollwork and dotted rays sits across the inner wrist, with a smaller partial motif higher on the forearm. The design is built from solid black outlines, fine stippled dots and open line work, with grey-toned shading inside the petals. The two side-by-side photographs show the same tattoo from the side of the arm and from the inner wrist, against a plain grey background.

Dotwork Blackwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Flower Dot Rosette Petal Scrollwork

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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 lens has to be cleaned before the gulls wake, my father used to say, because the glass remembers every breath that lands on it. I worked the chamois in small circles, starting at the bullseye in the centre and moving outward ring by ring, so no prism was touched twice. Spirit stung my knuckles. The sea was grey beyond the gallery rail and the rock under my boots still hummed with the night's swell.

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His logbooks sat in a tin trunk under my bed. In the margins, between notes about wind and visibility, he had drawn the lens again and again: petals of glass fanned around a small star, scrolls where the brass curved, and fine dots marking where the beam fell on the kitchen wall when the lamp was turned low. Beside one drawing he had written, light is only the ships' business. The pattern is ours. I used to think it was a joke. He was not a man who made jokes.

The automatic panel came in March, and a young man from the mainland office fitted it in an afternoon, shook my hand and took the boat back before tea. Now the lamp turns by itself. I still climb the iron stairs every Tuesday to clean the glass, because my hands do not know how to stop.

At dusk I switched on the spare lamp, the way I always have, for the crabbers coming home. The beam swept across the kitchen ceiling and the dotted rays of the old brass fell there in a ring, petal after petal, turning slowly until the ceiling went dark again. I stood on the chair and watched it go round, counting the petals as he must have done.