Black linework mandala with a central lotus flower and ornate paisley-style scrollwork covering the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black linework mandala covers the inner forearm, with a lotus flower with layered petals at its centre. Concentric rings of dotted and hatched detail surround the flower, and ornate scrolls and paisley-like shapes extend up and down the arm. The design is in black ink on skin with no colour, and the composition is centred along the length of the forearm.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Mandala Lotus Flower Paisley Scrollwork Ornament

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

Sit closer, all of you, and mind the lamp, because the oil is cheap and the smoke is not. Now. The copper compass slipped in the old mason's fist, the way copper does when the morning is damp, and the circle he had scratched into the wet lime came out with a bite in it, a small flat place like a thumb pressed into bread.

Keep reading

His apprentice, a girl from the salt towns named Ishani, wanted to scrape it and begin again. The mason would not let her. He said a flaw is only a door if you know where to walk through it. So they worked the bite into the pattern, and where the circle had gone wrong he drew a lotus, petal after petal, each one folded back on the one before, until the mistake sat at the heart of the flower like a drop of dew.

Here is the part the merchants never tell. For eleven days the wall was a mandala of rings, dotted and hatched, and scrolls ran from it up toward the roof and down toward the floor like vines that had decided to be clever. Every evening the apprentice counted the rings aloud, and every evening the count came out one short, because the mason had hidden one ring inside the lotus where only the sun could see it.

On the twelfth morning a traveller came in asking to be shown the perfect wall. Ishani took him to the flower and pointed at the small flat bite. "There," she said, "that is where it was perfect." And the traveller, who had come a long way to be cured of something, laughed until he had to sit down on the step.