Full forearm sleeve tattoo with a black and grey mandala and cube pattern, with red accents, shown on an outstretched arm against a timber wall.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric mandala sleeve on an arm

Geometric · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large sleeve tattoo covers the forearm and reaches up toward the upper arm, centred on a radial mandala with a repeating cube and lattice pattern beneath it. The work is built from dense dotwork and fine black and grey shading, with a few red and pink areas near the upper arm. The arm is held out in front of a wooden panelled wall, with a gold frame visible at the top of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Upper arm Mandala Lattice Geometric pattern Sleeve Flower

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

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the road is long and the wind takes the good parts first. You want to hear about the tile-maker's girl who lived where the salt road bends? Then listen. Her father cut clay on the dry lake, and she had a gift for seeing a floor before it was laid. Every courtyard she touched came out with cubes that looked stacked like a heap of sugar boxes, one turning into the next, so a man standing at the edge could not tell which corner was near and which was far.

Keep reading

The merchant from Yazd came one spring with twelve camels and a bad cough, and he paid her to make a floor for his guest house. She asked him only one thing: that he walk the courtyard at dawn before he walked it at noon. He laughed, but he did it. At dawn the shadows lay in the grooves and the lattice came up out of the stone, and at the very centre a rose opened from a ring of eight petals, each one cut so fine that the sand could not get into it.

Now here is the turn, and pay attention. The merchant tried to take the pattern with him. He had it copied onto cloth and sewn into the lining of his travelling coat, and he rode east. Every night on the road he unfolded the cloth, and every night the centre had moved a hand's width to the left, until one dusk he found the rose sitting at the edge of the cloth, with the cube pattern running off it into the dark. He turned the camels round. He never found the courtyard again, and the girl was gone too, though the tiles are still there, if you know which bend of the salt road to stop at and which way to look.