Two black ink mandala tattoos in dotwork style, one of a lotus on a woman's upper arm and shoulder and one of a dense flower on a forearm.

Black mandala tattoos on upper arm and forearm

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The top photograph shows a lotus mandala with layered petals, vertical dotted lines and fine ornamental detail running from the shoulder down the upper arm, with the subject's face cropped out of frame. The lower photograph shows a large, symmetrical flower mandala on the forearm, built from stippled dots and bold outlined petals. Both tattoos use black ink only, and the lower image shows printed flash designs in the background.

Dotwork Botanical Shoulder Upper arm Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Dahlia Petal Dot Ornament

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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 chandler's girl came up the hill on a Tuesday to fetch the widow's pattern-book, and found the old woman at the kitchen table with a pin in one hand and a pot of ink in the other. 'Every dot is a day,' the widow said, without looking up. 'Every petal is a boat that came home.' She had been pricking the same flower into paper for forty years, and she swore she had never once drawn it the same way twice.

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The girl asked why she never drew a boat instead, since the harbour was full of them. The widow said boats went down and flowers came back each summer on the sea wall, and that a bloom opened from the middle outward, the way a family does when the nets are in. She showed the girl how the outer petals were drawn bold and hard-edged, like the lines on a chart, while the inner rings were only dots, soft as spray, so that you had to stand close to the page to see them at all.

The winter the wall split, the widow stopped answering her door. The girl climbed the hill with a loaf and found the drawing pinned to the sill, every dot pricked through the paper and counted in pencil along the margin. Beneath it, in the same careful hand, were the words: Count them, then go down to the water.

The girl counted until the lamp guttered, and found there were exactly as many dots as there were names carved on the chapel wall. In the last ring, where the petals closed, the widow had left one space empty. The girl took the pin from the table, pressed a single dot into it, and walked down through the frost to the quay, where the tide was turning and the first boat of the morning was coming in.