Black ink forearm tattoo with a solid blackwork band containing white raindrops and a crescent moon, above a black mandala with leaves and dots.

Blackwork raindrops and mandala on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black band on the forearm contains negative-space raindrops and a crescent moon. Below it, a symmetrical mandala-style rosette with radiating petals, leaf shapes and small dots is drawn in black linework and fill. The design is in black ink only, shown against a dark background.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Raindrop Moon Crescent moon Mandala Rosette Leaves 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

Teodora had been up the scaffold since before dawn, mixing lime with water she could not spare, because the magistrate wanted the ceiling of the new bath-house finished before the festival. The rain had not fallen on Antioch for ninety days. Below her, the workmen had stopped singing.

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She drew the rosette with a cord and a sharpened reed: a circle, then another, then petals opening outward like a lamp lit from the middle. Her father had taught her that every circle was a promise to return to the same place. She marked eight dots around the rim the way he did, and wondered whether the men who paid her would notice that the leaves at the edge pointed towards the eastern wall, where the sky should have been.

The moon rose thin over the aqueduct, a paring of light. Teodora stopped, lime drying on her wrists, and laid a band of black across the plaster. Then she pressed the wet tip of her brush into it and lifted, again and again, leaving pale teardrops where the wall had been left bare.

At first light the magistrate came in, scowling at the cost, and stood beneath the white drops without speaking. A single bead of water fell from the scaffold cord and struck the centre of the rosette. The old man laughed, and Teodora laughed with him, and the lime took the wet mark as if it had always been there.