Black and grey photograph of a mandala tattoo with dotwork dotted lines and arrows across the lower chest and upper abdomen, with a navel piercing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and dotwork tattoo below the bust

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala sits at the centre of the torso below the bust, with a fan of solid black petals and scalloped rings. Fine dotted lines and small arrowheads radiate outwards on either side, and the navel piercing sits to the right of the design. The photograph is greyscale, so the black ink reads with strong contrast against the skin.

Dotwork Geometric Chest Mandala Dot Arrow Petal Symmetry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's chain was still wet from the ford when Ada Pelling pinned the drawing to the kitchen table and told her brother the ash wood had moved again. Tom didn't look up from his porridge. He had stopped looking up for anything since the spring the millpond froze solid in May. Ada smoothed the paper flat with the heel of her hand. Every boundary stone in Hollin Bottom was marked on it in her father's neat hand, and beside each one she had inked a dot where a tree now stood that had not stood the year before.

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The dots ran in lines out from the old oak at the centre, scalloped like the rings a stone leaves in still water, and at the end of each line she had drawn a small arrowhead. Her father had called it the compass rose. Ada had decided it was something else. Three nights she lay awake listening to the wood creak, and on the fourth she took the lantern and walked the lines by moonlight, counting her paces the way he had taught her to count chain links.

The arrows led her past the ruined sheepfold, past a ring of bracken gone black at its edges, and out to the last cottage at the village end, empty since the fever. Its back door hung open. Inside, on the flagstones, a dozen saplings had rooted through the cracks in a perfect circle, their stems bent inwards like petals closing for the night.

She knelt and took the pencil from behind her ear. Beside the final arrow she made one more dot and felt, absurdly, that it was the right size. When she walked home the wood was silent behind her. Tom was waiting at the gate with the lamp lit, and the map on the table had a new dot on it, sitting exactly where her own front step was.