Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo wrapping around the inner forearm, with layered petal shapes and small dots at the edges.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork mandala band on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A mandala-style band of lotus-like petals wraps around the inner forearm, with a crescent shape and small dots at the outer edges. The design is built from bold black outlines, with the petals filled in by dense stippled dotwork and solid black areas that create depth. The ink is black and grey only, and the band is framed centrally on a plain background of skin.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Lotus Petal Dot Crescent

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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 closer, you with the cold hands, because the wind up at Kesh Pass takes the words out of an old man's mouth and throws them down the valley before they reach you. I will say it once, and loud.

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There was a well-cutter named Tomas Veler, not a fool but not wise either, who was paid by the monastery below to cut a ring of stone for the spring at the top of the pass. He wanted the ring to look like the lotus that grows in the lowland marshes, which he had seen once as a boy and never forgot. So he cut petal after petal, eleven rows deep, and the monks climbed up to watch and said the petals were too heavy, that the stone would split under its own weight by the first thaw.

He did not listen. He worked through the snow with a punch and a hammer, pecking every petal full of tiny holes so the light would sink into the stone instead of glaring off it. When the work was done there was a crescent of new moon carved high on the eastern face, and beside it, where the ring met the rock, he punched two hollows and left them empty. Asked what they were for, he said they were for the two who would carry the water up and never come back down.

The winter was long. The ring did not split. In spring the thaw came and the spring ran clear through the petals and over the lip, and the monks drank from it and called it the moon's cup. Tomas went down the pass that April with his tools on his back and was never seen again. Some say he walked all the way to the marshes to find his lotus. Every traveller who fills a flask at Kesh still counts the dots before drinking, and I have never met one who came up one short.