Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with a sixteen-point star at its centre, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork mandala star on forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey mandala-style design made of a sixteen-point star at the centre, surrounded by outlined petal and lattice shapes. The star is built from solid black points and fine white-outlined lines, while the outer rings are formed from stippled dots that fade toward the edges. The design is centred on the forearm against a plain pale wall, shown straight on.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Star Rosette Circle Petal

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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 down, the lot of you, and mind the nets. No, Tam, not that one, that's Mrs Hallows's cat's bed. Now. You all know the old rose on the wall of the Ness Inn, the one with sixteen points, black at the heart and grey as sea-fret at the rim. Your grandfathers swore by it. Every man who ever sailed out of Garrow Bay steered by that star, though none of them could say who drew it.

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Old Ebba Crane drew it, the year the herring went north and nobody came home for six weeks. She was a chart-maker's widow with ink under every nail, and she had a boy called Silas who would not stop crying at night. So she sat him on the harbour steps and took a bodkin and pricked dots into a scrap of sailcloth, thousands of them, one at a time, because she said a line would break in weather but a dot would hold. Silas counted them until he fell asleep. By morning there was a star.

The fleet went out in the storm anyway, eleven boats, and the fog came down thick as wool. Silas, who had grown into a lanky lad with bad eyes, stood at the stern with that sailcloth held up to the lamp and called out the bearings. Sixteen points, he said, and the dots go pale where the land is. They brought all eleven back. Ebba died that winter, and the star was nailed above the door of the inn, where it has been ever since, its dots fading toward the edge like the last of the light on water.