Black and grey dotwork mandala with a flower of life centre and leaf motifs covering the back of a hand and forearm, with small letters on the fingers.

Mandala and flower of life on hand and forearm

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of the back of a hand and part of the forearm, covered in a symmetrical mandala. The central motif is a flower of life pattern surrounded by layered petals, feather-like leaves and star shapes. The work uses fine linework combined with stippled dotwork shading, and small stylised lettering sits on the fingers against a plain light background.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Hand Forearm Mandala Flower of life Leaves Feather Star Dot Lettering Geometric pattern

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, and mind the bees, they are not yet abed. My great-grandmother's great-grandmother kept the walled garden at Harrowmere Hall, and she kept it the way a clockmaker keeps a clock. Every morning she walked the paths in rings, one ring inside another, and every morning she came back to the middle, where the old well stood under its cap of ivy and the stone rim was worn smooth by a hundred years of hands.

Keep reading

The year the frost came early, the roses went black in a single night, and the steward blamed the lad who tended the dovecote, a boy called Tobias Quill with ink on his fingers and a head full of sums. Tobias said the frost had come down in stars, six points each, and he had counted them on the leaves by lamplight. Nobody believed him until the next dawn, when every leaf on the north wall was furred with exactly that frost, and a magpie feather lay on the well rim, though no magpie had come near it.

The old gardener, who had taught Tobias his letters with a trowel, pressed a cold finger to the well stone and drew the pattern her own mother had taught her: a circle, then six circles touching it, then six more around those, each one overlapping the next until the whole garden seemed to be standing inside a single seed. Then she wrote the names of the beds across her knuckles in ink, so her hands could work the soil without her eyes ever leaving it.

The roses came back that spring, and Tobias kept that feather in his hatband for the rest of his life. If you go to the church and ask the verger nicely, he will show you it, still tucked in the pew where the boy used to sit. Now off with you, the bees are finally going home.