Black and grey geometric mandala with dotwork shading on a person's ribs, beside a colourful bird tattoo on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric mandala tattoo on the ribs

Geometric · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A radial mandala with a sun-like centre, pointed petals and layered geometric triangles sits on the side of the torso, with the shirt lifted to show it. The mandala is built from fine linework and dotwork stippling that creates soft grey shading. A coloured tattoo of a bird with red and green tones runs along the arm at the left edge of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Ribs Upper arm Mandala Sun Geometric pattern Dot Bird

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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

By the third week on Skerrow Rock you can read the weather from the way the gulls sit on the gallery rail, and Mr Pell has stopped pretending he needs you to check the wick. He sends you up the spiral stair with the tin of polish and a rag, and tells you to start at the centre and work outwards, the way the mantle was set when the lamp came over from Glasgow in crates.

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The lens is a great ring of prisms, each one cut to bend the flame into a single beam, and at its heart sits the brass hub with its ring of studs, twelve of them, dull as old pennies. You count them twice because Pell counts them every dusk. Eleven, twelve. Below, the sea has begun its slow argument with the foot of the rock, and the bands of light the prisms throw across the whitewash keep sliding away like something trying to get out of a net.

The night the boat did not come in, Pell sat on the bottom step with his pipe unlit and told you that a lamp is only a sun that has been taught to stay put. You did not understand him then. You polished the centre until your knuckles bled, not because it needed it, but because the fog had come down so thick that the hub was the only thing you could see, a small hard star in all that white.

At first light the fog thinned and there was a dinghy pulling round the north skerry, low in the water, two men and a sack. You lit nothing. You simply went on working the cloth in slow rings from the middle outwards, and when the boat grounded in the cove below, you found you had polished the whole lens twice and could no longer say why you had started.