Black ink ornamental mandala tattoo across the back of a hand, wrist and fingers, with stacked rings and pink nails.

Black ornamental mandala hand tattoo

Geometric · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A hand and part of the wrist, resting on a white sheet, carry a large black ink design of lace-like scallops, radiating mandala motifs and fern-like swirls. Fine dotted and line detail extends onto the fingers and up the forearm. The image is a close, evenly lit colour photograph with the ink as the only strong tone against the skin.

Geometric Hand Mandala Ornamental pattern Chevron Dot

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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

Sit yourself down by the range, and mind the coal dust on the fender. My grandfather's grandfather cut the first fern out of the Ashgill seam with a borrowed pick and a bad temper, and he swore the stone had been waiting for him to ask. The leaves came away printed in black as clean as ink, every frond lifting off the grey as if it had only just stopped breathing.

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Down Chapel Row lived Mrs Abney, who made bobbin lace for the chapel women and could not abide a plain edge. Every scallop had to sit a little over the one below, the way rain runs off a slate roof. When the buzzer sounded and the men came up grey-faced, she would set her bobbins aside and draw the fern again on the back of a ration card, with a small dot wherever her pin had stopped to rest.

Her grandson Tomas carried those cards down the shaft in his tin lunch box, and the overman took them for survey sheets and nailed one above the pit-head gate. Three weeks later the roof came in on the east face. The rescue men went in following the scallops on that card through the dust, counting dots the way you count stairs in the dark, and every one of them came out.

Mrs Abney never charged for lace after that. She asked only that the men let her put a chevron on every cuff, a little V for each one who had walked out under the hill. So when you see those small V-shapes stitched along a sleeve at the market, you'll know what they are counting.