Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a radiating leaf mandala on the back of a hand, with a geometric cube pattern running up the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leaf mandala tattoo on the hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a hand gripping the edge of a jacket, showing a dense radial cluster of outlined leaves across the back of the hand. The leaves are filled with stippled dot shading and fine outlines, and a repeating isometric cube pattern extends up toward the wrist and forearm. The dark background and soft side lighting focus attention on the tattoo's contrast and texture.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Hand Forearm Leaves Mandala Floral

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

You learned the garden the way you learned the tides, by losing things to it. The salt took the first sowings of the spring and the gulls took the rest, so by March you had stopped planting in rows and started planting in rings: a dozen sea kale leaves pressed round a single stone, the way your mother had sketched it on the back of a bread wrapper. Nothing on Carrick Holm grows straight. Everything grows out from the middle, looking for shelter.

Keep reading

The cottage floor was laid in the summer of 1911 by a man named Aldous Fenwick, who loved a tessellation and had very little patience for weather. His grey flagstones were edged in black slate, and they ran from the scullery door to the foot of the tower stair, so that from the right angle the floor looked like a stack of crates that had decided to stand on their corners. You crossed them every evening with the lamp oil, counting under your breath, and never once arrived at the same number twice.

The autumn the storm took the cottage roof, you found Aldous's ledger in the lamp room. Every entry had a pressed leaf tucked into its fold, each one dated and marked with a bearing. The last page, in ink gone the colour of weak tea, read: "Plant the middle first. The rest will find its way out." You carried the ledger down the stair one cube at a time and sowed the next spring's kale in a perfect ring, sheltered by the tower wall.

On the first clear morning the rosette had opened, every leaf turned outward like a congregation reading from the same hymn sheet. You crouched at its edge with your palm flat on the cold stone. The lamp beam came round the tower and swept across the leaves, the floor and you, and for one slow turn of the light the whole island cast the same shadow.