Black ornamental mandala tattoo with dotted scalloped edging on the side of a torso below the bust, with a navel piercing visible.

Black mandala tattoo on the ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large black mandala sits on the side of the torso below the bust, with a central radial rosette surrounded by petal-like scallops and fine dotted lines. The ink is solid black with fine hatched and stippled detail in the petals, and no colour is present. The photograph is taken at a close angle with the subject's hand resting at the top edge of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Ribs Mandala Rosette Scallop Dotted line Ornament Lace pattern

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

The lacemaker of Hale Cross had promised her pattern to the miller's son before the frost came, but the pattern was never finished. Every evening she sat by the window with her bobbins clicking, and every morning the lace on the pillow had grown a ring wider, a rosette at its heart and scallops spilling outward like the petals of some flower that did not grow in English soil.

Keep reading

Her mother said the design was a map of the stars. Her neighbour said it was a prayer nobody could read. The priest, who came to see the wedding dress, held a corner of the cloth to the light and said only that the dots were very fine, and that a man could lose his way in them if he followed them too closely.

On the eve of the wedding she sewed the last loop and found the centre was missing. A rosette wants a hub, and she had worked around an empty space all winter without knowing it. She took her scissors to the lace and cut a single thread from the outer edge, then unpicked it inward, one dot at a time, until the small hole at the middle was filled with a circle no bigger than a thimble.

At dawn the miller's son came to the door with his hat in his hands and asked to see the pattern. She laid the lace across the table. He traced the dotted line around the edge with one finger, then the scallops, and then he stopped at the centre and said quietly that he had never seen a flower that knew where it began. She told him that was the trouble with lace: you always had to start from the middle and work outward, and the thread never forgot where it came from.