Black and grey dotwork mandala and flower of life tattoo covering the shoulder and upper arm, shown in a two-panel view from the back and side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and flower of life shoulder piece

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white diptych shows a large shoulder and upper arm tattoo of stacked mandala medallions joined by a flower of life pattern of overlapping circles. The work is built from dense dotwork and fine linework, with shaded petals and scalloped dotted bands near the lower edge of the arm. Only black ink and grey tones appear against pale skin, with dark fabric visible at the bottom of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Mandala Flower of life Geometric pattern Floral motif

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass had been Aunt Ruth's, and she had taught me to hold it like a pen, thumb on the hinge, so the point never wandered. By the third winter of the Thursday class I could draw a circle inside a circle without the paper tearing, and the chalk lines on the church hall floor were the only straight things I trusted.

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It was Mr Okonedo who showed us the flower of life, six circles around one, then six more around each of those, until the overlap made a lattice that looked like it had been there before the paper. He said every circle touched its neighbours' centres, and that if you kept going the pattern would fill any wall you gave it. I asked him what happened at the edge. He smiled and said the edge was just the place where you stopped drawing and started looking.

I didn't tell anyone that I went back to the hall alone on the Sunday after the flood, when the river had lapped at the skirting boards and dried in a grey tidemark. The chalk had survived. Inside the largest medallion I had drawn years before, someone had dotted a ring of tiny points, one for each place a tap had dripped onto the floor, and the water had left its own mandala in the dust.

I stood in the middle of it with the compass in my pocket and understood the pattern was simply a record of everything that had touched it. I didn't draw anything that day. I just counted the dots, all forty-one of them, and went home.