Black and white photo of a floral and geometric tattoo design drawn in a sketchbook, beside a dotwork mandala tattoo on a forearm.

Floral and geometric sketch with forearm mandala

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing in a sketchbook shows a vertical design of a lily-like flower, leaves, spirals and geometric motifs such as a flower-of-life pattern and a circle with inner lines. The linework is fine and uniform, with stippled dots adding shading around the petals and circles. On the left, a forearm carries a black mandala tattoo with dotted circles, and fine pens and a keyboard sit beside the sketchbook.

Fine line Geometric Botanical Forearm Flower Lily Leaf Spiral Mandala Flower of life Geometric Circle Sketch Pen Dot

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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

The last lord of Carrow Keep wanted a tower that would never fall, so he sent for every mason between the moors and the sea. Only old Tamsin Brack bothered to draw her plans on paper. She drew a ring, then six petals fitted inside it, then a ring inside those, and she said that was how stone agreed to stand together. The lord laughed and had her plans nailed to the gatepost as a joke, and the masons built by the cords and dividers they had always used.

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The tower came down on a night of west wind, with the lord inside it. The keep was left to the rooks and the nettles, and nobody went into the courtyard much after that. But in the third spring a white lily came up through a crack in the flagstones, right at the spot where Tamsin's dividers had pricked the stone. Its stem coiled like a fern before it unrolled, and the village children counted its petals every May and got different numbers.

Ruth Penhale, who kept goats on the slope below, climbed up one June to see the lily for herself. Its seed head had a disc with fine lines running through it, and she found the old plans still pinned to the gatepost, rotted to lace but readable. She took a cutting home in a wet rag, and the lily died in her window box within a week. She tried again, and again, until she copied the drawing onto a board and scratched a ring of stones around the root with a pair of dividers. The next spring it flowered in her own yard.

Her grandson still keeps the original drawing folded in the family Bible, and every spring he kneels by the ring of stones to see whether the lily has opened.