Colourful geometric mandala tattoo on a forearm, with black linework, dotwork shading and soft pink, teal and yellow washes of colour.

Geometric mandala on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A circular mandala of overlapping petal shapes and small leaves sits at the centre of the forearm, outlined in fine black linework. Dense stippled dots shade the outer edge, while soft washes of pink, red, teal, yellow and green fill the petals. The design is centred on the forearm and fills most of the frame, with a plain dark sleeve on the left and a wooden floor in the background.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Leaves Dot

Find an artist for this

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 rain arrived on the Thursday, three hours before I had planned to lay out the pigments, so I did what any sensible woman on the Ash Flats road would do and ran outside in my socks. Dust turned to paste under my feet. The garage sign at the crossroads had been bleached to a ghost of its letters for years, and now the water was running off its edges in pale pink streaks.

Keep reading

My grandmother taught me watercolour on the back step of this same petrol station, using a tin of pans and a jam jar of water. She said a wash is only honest when you cannot take it back. I had spent the morning sketching a mandala on the concrete apron with chalk, eight rings of petals drawn from the centre outward, each one overlapping the next like a dahlia seen from above. Leaves at the rim. Stipple at the edge where the dust would fall.

The rain did the colouring for me. It pulled the chalk into soft smears and carried the pink from the old sign down the slope, so teal bled into yellow where the puddles met, and red from a spilled can of paint crept under the petals. A lorry driver stopped to ask if I was all right. I told him I was finishing a painting. He looked at the sky, then at the water, and drove on.

By dusk the flood had soaked into the ground and the apron was pale again, the chalk gone. But when the low sun came across the flats, the petals were still there, pressed into the concrete in faint dark lines where the pigment had settled. I took a photograph on my phone, though there was little to see except the outline and a sheen. Some things only exist once.