Close view of a metallic gold and navy blue mandala-style temporary tattoo on the back of a hand, with a gold forearm design visible at the wrist.

Gold and navy mandala design on hand

Hand · Colour · Photo

A woman's torso and hand are shown, with a symmetrical mandala-style design in metallic gold and dark navy on the back of the hand. Gold scrollwork and leaf-like motifs continue onto the wrist and forearm. The fine, crisp outlines sit against a bright, softly blurred beach background, and the design is the clear focal point.

Hand Forearm Mandala Ornament Scrollwork Leaf Floral Metallic

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 scaffold groaned every time the wind came up off the firth, and after three weeks I had stopped minding. Below me the nave was a drift of slate and pigeon feathers. Above me the dome had split like a cracked boiled egg, and sky showed through in patches the colour of skimmed milk. Only the rosette in the crown had held. Eight navy points were cut into the plaster, each one as sharp as a sail, with a ring of gold leaf between them and a scroll of acanthus so fine it looked drawn with a single hair.

Keep reading

Master Ruaidhri had ground the lapis himself, in a stone mortar he would not let me touch. "Blue is the only colour that remembers the sky," he said, and then he went quiet for a day, because his hands had begun to shake and the blue would not sit flat. I learned the rest from him in the mornings: how to breathe on the size until it turned tacky, how to lay the leaf with a squirrel-hair brush and never, ever press.

He died in February, in the chapel's one dry corner, with a cup of cold tea beside him. I finished the rosette alone. My first two points tore, and I wept over them like a fool, then scraped them back and began again. On the last morning I laid the final scroll of gold, and a pigeon landed on the top of the scaffold and cocked its head at the star.

That night the rain came through the hole in the dome and pooled on the chapel floor. The boards bent under me. But when I climbed up at dawn the gold was bright and the navy was deep, and the little star at the centre caught the first light and threw it back at me, as if someone had finally answered.