Black and grey tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm with a rose, a central mandala flower and ornate paisley linework below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral mandala sleeve on upper arm

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm of a person in a sleeveless black and white top, set against a dark background. A large rose and leaves sit at the top, with a detailed mandala-style flower in the centre and fine ornamental linework and paisley-like scrolls running down towards the elbow. The design uses black ink and grey shading, with stippled texture in the flower petals and clean outlines throughout.

Botanical Dotwork Shoulder Upper arm Rose Mandala Flower Leaves Paisley Ornament

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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 chart had come out of the sea wrapped in oilcloth, its corners gone soft as bread, and Ines pinned it flat on the kitchen table with two mugs and a jar of pencils. Someone had drawn a rose in the margin, a compass rose really, eight petals of careful ink, and around it the currents ran in loops like the scrolls on an old tea caddy. Her grandfather used to say the tides were a language. He never said it came with a dictionary, and she had spent three nights looking for the place where the words began.

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The harbourmaster, Callum Reith, came up the hill on Thursday with his cap in his hands and a tin of shortbread he had clearly been carrying for some time. He studied the table for a long while. Then he tapped the centre of the rose, where the stippled dots gathered thickest, and said that was where the Maid had gone down in fifty-eight. The lifeboat men had never found her because the water turned on itself there, like a dog settling into a bed.

Ines sat with that. She took a fine nib and went over the dots one by one, drawing the spirals tighter, so that the loops folded inward on the wreck and held it the way the flower held its centre. The outer scrolls she left loose, where the water ran out towards open sea and nothing was ever lost for good.

When she finished, Callum held the page up to the window and the light came through the ink. 'That's the Maid,' he said, quite quietly. 'You've drawn the way in.' She did not tell him she had only copied what the sea had already done. She folded the chart along its old creases and gave it back to the man who would take it out in the morning.