Black ink botanical mandala with a curled figure in a circle, covering a rounded bare abdomen, in a blackwork and botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Floral mandala with curled figure on a belly

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A rounded bare abdomen is covered in dark ink linework. A large circle at the centre holds a pale, curled figure set against a dark solid fill. The circle is framed by flowers, leaves and ornate filigree swirls that extend across the skin.

Botanical Blackwork Other Mandala Flower Leaves Swirl Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dormouse was curled so tight in the bramble leaves under the potting shed that Ivy almost mistook it for a pale stone. It was the second week of November, the ground had gone hard as a biscuit tin, and she had come out for the spade. Instead she knelt in the damp moss, lifted the little animal in both palms, and carried it indoors in a shoebox lined with her late husband's jumper.

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She put the box on the warm side of the range and sat with it until her tea went cold. The sleeper did not stir. Ivy had kept bees and hens and a fat tabby that died at nineteen, and she knew how a creature could look finished when it was only resting. So she fetched her pencil and the back of an old seed catalogue and began to draw. A ring first, then dog roses round the rim, bindweed looping between them in fine filigree, and at the heart a small curled shape she shaded black around, so the pale body would glow against the dark.

Her neighbour's boy came round in the spring with a jam jar of primroses and found the tin lid propped against the kettle. He traced the petals with a grubby finger. "Why's it got flowers all round?" he asked. "So he has something to wake up towards," Ivy said, and the boy seemed satisfied.

The dormouse left the box in April, when the hawthorn was out. Ivy found the nest empty and a faint trail of prints across the lid, where the ink had worn away in four small smudges, leading back to the door.