Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo spreading across a person's hip and upper thigh, photographed from the side against a plain background.

Dotwork mandala on hip and thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala with a starburst centre and diamond-shaped petals spreads from the hip down over the upper thigh. The design is built from fine stippled dots that create the lines and gradual shading, fading outward toward the edges. The image is black and white, with a plain pale backdrop and the body in side profile.

Dotwork Geometric Thigh Other Mandala Starburst Diamond Sunburst Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you with the wet sandals, and mind the brazier, because the next part is about the sun, and the sun does not care who is standing in its light. Four days out from the salt flats, the caravan of Ibn Sahl lost its guide to a fever, and the only map left was the one the old woman Nessa kept behind her eyes, which was a map of stars and nothing else.

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She would not write it on hide or bark. Instead she knelt in the dust at dusk, pressed the tip of a tent peg into the sand, and began to dot. Tap, tap, tap, a thousand small pricks, each one a grain of the night sky, until a ring of light grew out from a single point at the centre. Then she drew eight diamonds around the hub, and inside each diamond another diamond, and inside those a smaller one, like doors opening into doors. The merchants laughed at her, until the lowest petal caught the last of the red light and they saw that it pointed straight down at the earth.

Ibn Sahl wanted to carry the pattern away on parchment. Nessa only shook her head and told him to walk it. So they walked the spokes one by one, counting the dots under their feet, turning at every diamond the way the stars had turned, until the youngest boy stopped and said the sand under him was cooler. He dug with his hands. Below the lowest petal, water rose slow and dark into the hole he had made.

The camels knelt at the centre of the circle that night, and nobody stepped outside its lines. If you ever see such a sunburst drawn on a wall, look first for the single dot at its heart. Someone, once, was thirsty there, and someone thought carefully about how to say so.