Close-up of a blue and violet mandala tattoo with fine ornamental linework covering the top of a woman's shoulder and upper arm.

Blue mandala tattoo on the shoulder

Geometric · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is a large mandala built from layered petal-like scallops with radiating fine lines, circles and small diamond motifs. The linework is crisp and even, with shading used sparingly, and the ink reads in blue with purple accents that fade toward the top of the shoulder. The photo is cropped at the neck and collarbone, with the design framed against plain skin and a pale green wall.

Geometric Shoulder Mandala Petal Ornamental pattern Diamond Circle

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 Saltmere Cove had a daughter who could not sleep unless the sea was counted. Each night she sat at the window with a bowl of blue dye and a needle, and each night she pricked one more petal onto the linen, scallop after scallop, until the cloth looked like the tide had folded itself into flowers. The fishermen's wives came to watch. They said the patterns held the boats in the harbour and kept the nets from tearing.

Keep reading

One winter the bowl ran dry and the girl went down to the rock pools at the turn of the year to find the purple shell that the old dyers used. The tide came in faster than she expected, and she sat on the highest stone with her skirts wet to the knee, counting waves the way her mother had taught her. She counted to a hundred and then to a hundred again. A seal put its head up beside her, looked at her work-stained fingers, and dived.

When the water fell back she found the shell in a crack, glossy and small, and beside it a fragment of a grey net that had caught a stranger's buoy. She carried both home. That spring she dyed the linen the colour of the shallows at dusk, with purple at the edges where the light gave out. The cloth went to the harbour master's house and then to his daughter's wedding, and nobody in Saltmere ever asked where the second colour came from. The girl kept the last petal unfinished, the one nearest the centre, so that the pattern could always be started again.