Bare legs in shallow surf with a hand resting on a knee, showing a black ornamental mandala band and floral linework on the forearm and wrist.

Mandala and floral tattoos on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman sits with her legs in shallow sea foam, one hand resting on her knee. Her wrist and forearm carry a dark ornamental mandala band and floral linework in black ink. A small line of script sits on her upper thigh, too small to read clearly.

Blackwork Forearm Thigh Mandala Flower Leaves Script Wrist band

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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

You are the youngest copyist at Saint Hilda's on the fen edge, and Brother Anselm has given you the margins of the Psalter because your hand is steady and your letters are small. The ink is iron gall and smells faintly of vinegar. Rule the circle with the bone point, he tells you, and leave a gap at the top so the Word has a way in.

Keep reading

The days pass in the cold scriptorium. You draw the mandala in the corner of the eighth folio: a ring of lotus petals, then bands of interlace copied from the lintel of the chapter house. Your fingers blacken to the second knuckle. In the refectory the brothers talk of the spring flood that took the eastern dyke, and you keep your eyes on the vellum while the tide comes in grey across the mudflats below the orchard wall.

One evening Anselm finds you with the page and says nothing for a long while. Then he takes a fine stylus and adds, beside your petals, a trailing briar of small leaves, the kind that grows along the garden wall where nobody prunes. A circle needs something that is allowed to wander, he says. Otherwise it is only a cell with a pretty floor.

The next morning the ink is dry and the page lies open in the window light. You notice the briar has already crept past the ruled border into the empty margin, where no rule can follow it.