Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Dotwork mandala design in red, yellow and green
Dotwork · Mixed · Flash
A circular mandala drawn in black pen, built from layered petal shapes, radiating geometric panels and a central flower. Stippled dotwork fills the shadowed areas, while clean linework outlines the petals and borders. Red, yellow and green accents sit within the black and grey structure, and the design fills the frame against a plain white background.
Find an artist for thisTake 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
Mum never drew anything straight. She'd sit at the kitchen table on Sunday nights with the biros from the corner shop, the ones that ran dry halfway through a petal, and start in the dead centre of a sheet where nobody could see her beginning. Dad called them her wheels. He said they were a waste of ink, and then he'd fetch the good fineliners from the drawer under the tea towels so she didn't have to make do.
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She never explained them. When I asked what they were for, she said they kept her hands busy while the wireless talked about the price of coal. Some circles she shaded with tiny dots, thousands of them, a whole winter in the grey middle, and she'd hold each one up to the bulb as if checking for dust.
The year the mill shut, she filled a dozen sheets in a week. Red for the bus fares, yellow for the milk, green for whatever was coming up in the back yard that nobody had planted. I found them stacked under the cutlery tray after the funeral, every one with a small dot at its heart where she had started.
I do the same now, on the backs of invoices at my own kitchen table. You begin with a dot, and the petals come out of it on their own, and I have never once managed to finish one.
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