Black ink drawing of a tattoo design: a splattered circle and upright mark at the centre, surrounded by a ring of pointed petals with swirls and dots, shown on white paper beside a pen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ink mandala with splattered symbol design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing shows a bold central symbol, a circle crossed by an upright stroke with ink splashes and drips across it. The symbol sits inside a ring of pointed, petal-like shapes decorated with fine swirls, scrolls and small dots. The solid black strokes contrast with the stippled dotwork shading on the petals, and the design is shown on white paper with a pen placed below it.

Blackwork Dotwork Circle Symbol Mandala Petal Swirl Dot Ink splatter Scroll

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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

Don't fidget, I'm getting to the petals. The Corrigan Brothers' Travelling Marvel had forty-one scalloped flaps of painted canvas sewn round the rim of its big top, one for every town it had ever played. Every winter Mother Hester sat under the lamp with her needles and added a new one, so that from the Stockport road the tent still looked like a flower opening.

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Then the money went the way of the lions. By the spring of the fire year there was only Hester, a juggler with a bad hip, and Tom the clown, who could never keep a straight face for love nor money. The bills were the last thing the company had left to sell, and Hester painted every one herself. She dipped her brush in the black ink she used for the posters and flicked it over the ring mark at the centre, where the circle sat crossed by the king pole. Tom said the splashes made the mark look alive. Hester said that was the only thing about the show that still was.

On the last night the rain came in sideways and a gust took the big top flat. The forty-one petals came down one by one into the mud like wet handkerchiefs. Hester stood in the empty ring with a lantern and counted them twice. Then she knelt, dabbed one finger in the spilt ink, and pressed a single dot onto the sawdust where the pole had stood. Forty-two, she said. That's the one nobody can take off us. So if you ever pass a faded flower on a road outside Stockport with one petal missing, that's where the show went, and it's still standing in the dark.