Black and grey geometric mandala tattoo with dotwork shading and interlocking circles, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric mandala tattoo on the upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala sits on the outer upper arm, built from angular star points and overlapping faceted panels. Solid black outlines are paired with stippled dotwork shading that grades the panels from dark to light, and a ring of fine dots surrounds the outer petals. Two overlapping circles sit at the centre. The work is entirely black and grey against pale skin and a plain light background.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Mandala Geometric pattern Star Circle Dot Overlapping circles

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mate had lost the chart somewhere past the thirtieth parallel, so Ysolde drew the sky again on the back of the spare mainsail, starting with the star that never moved. She pricked it in with a sailmaker's awl, dot by dot, until every star had eight points and the points sat in rings like the petals of a wheel. The crew laughed at the dots. Her uncle Orrin said nothing, because he had heard his own grandmother talk about the two moons over the Gannet Shoals, and how they never rose in the same place twice.

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Ysolde hung two lanterns from the foremast, one either side of the stay. When fog came down thick as wool on the ninth night, she told the helmsman to steer so the lights sat one over the other, two circles knotted together, and to keep them that way however the wind pulled. The sailors grumbled that a drawing could not steer a ship. Still, the lanterns overlapped, and the water under the hull turned from black to a grey that tasted of chalk, which meant the shoals were near.

At midnight the bell in the bows began to ring by itself. Orrin, who had stopped sleeping, climbed up beside her and asked which way the sound came from. She tapped the stitched star. "The answer is in the petals," she said, "not in the bell." They turned one point to starboard, the lanterns slid apart by the width of a thumb, and the bell fell silent.

By morning the fog had lifted and the sail was pale where the awl had gone through, a field of small holes that caught the sun. Ysolde counted them while the crew slept, and there were exactly as many as there had been stars on the chart the mate had lost. She kept the sail and never asked where the chart had gone.