Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and feather face profile design

Geometric · Other · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a human face in profile, with a radiating mandala of dots, triangles and teardrop shapes spreading from the brow and temple. A feather with fine hatched lines hangs from the back of the design, and a beaded line runs down toward the neck. The work uses clean black linework and stippled dots on a plain white background, with no colour.

Geometric Dotwork Other Face Profile Mandala Feather Dot Teardrop Triangle Ray Sun Neck Bead

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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

Dear Maren, the dots have come out wrong again. The Chancellor wants the sun over the north gate to throw seventeen rays, one for each province, and every time I cut the seventeenth the brass splits along the grain. I have stopped sleeping well. Last night I sat under the lamp and drew the whole thing again on the back of your old ledger, the bead-line running down from the centre like a plumb string, the teardrops falling like rain that has changed its mind.

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You will laugh, but I went to the feather-market at Sallow Cross to find a quill fine enough for the hatching. A woman there, selling heron plumes by the bundle, asked whose sun I was making. When I told her, she took a grey feather from her hat and said the old engravers never used the Chancellor's count at all. They counted the beads on the neck, one for each person who had walked out past the salt flats and not come back. I thought it was a story for children. Then I counted the beads on my drawing and there were fourteen, and I stopped laughing.

So I have changed the sun. Thirty-one rays, uneven, and each one stops short of the rim where a name would go. The Chancellor will be furious. The brass will crack again, I expect, and I shall have to hide the pieces in the bellows box until spring.

I am sending you the feather. Keep it somewhere the damp cannot reach. If the gate sun is ever lit at dusk, stand in the road and count the rays that go dark. Your loving sister, Iwe.