Woman seated with long wavy hair, showing black and grey mandala tattoos on her upper arm and wrist and a cat head tattoo on her forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and cat tattoos on arms

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits with her back to the camera, her long wavy hair falling forward, and her arms in view. She has a black and grey mandala on the upper arm, a cat head on the forearm with smaller line work around it, and a dotted mandala design at the wrist. The shading is black and grey, with the mandalas built from dotwork and fine geometric detail against her skin.

Geometric Dotwork Upper arm Forearm Mandala Cat Anchor Compass Woman Arm

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 stove has gone out again, and you are on your knees in the galley of the Halcyon Vane with a bucket of seawater and a tin of pumice when the cat strolls over the coaming as if it owns the boat. It is grey, with a dark smudge of fur around its eyes like a thumbprint, and it sits on the bread shelf and studies you the way the bosun studies a rope coiled the wrong way.

Keep reading

Mr Okonedo is ashore with his sister's fever, so the stew is yours. You chop onions, measure barley by the palm, and keep one eye on the brass compass card screwed to the bulkhead, its needle swinging east and then back, as though the ship cannot decide where it wants to be. The cat watches the needle too. Each time the bow lifts it rises, and each time the bow drops it settles, and you begin to suspect it is reading the swell better than the chart in the wheelhouse.

Around noon the sea turns and the pot skids across the range. You grab the rail, the lamp swings wide, and for a moment the anchor painted on the far wall seems to drag itself loose. The cat does not move. It simply blinks, slow and certain, and you steady the pot with a folded cloth and a word you would not repeat to the chaplain.

When Okonedo comes back with a bag of lemons and worse news about his sister, the stew is thick, the floor is dry, and the cat is asleep on the flour sacks. You set a saucer of fish beside it, then take the pencil from behind your ear and mark a small cross on the galley chart, just where the cat chose to sit when the boat first began to roll.