Black and grey dotwork mandala and geometric lattice sleeve covering an upper arm and forearm, with a triangular motif near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and geometric arm sleeve

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The sleeve covers the arm with large mandala-style flowers built from fine radiating lines and rows of stippled dots. A flat lattice of interlocking six-pointed stars fills the lower section, and a triangular motif sits on the upper part of the arm. The shading moves from solid black to pale grey, and the image has a plain light background.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Forearm Mandala Flower Triangle Lattice Star Geometric pattern Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Hollin Gate had been planted by a man who hated crooked things, so every tree stood where a string had put it. Forty rows of Bramley and Egremont Russet, and between the rows a lattice of paths that crossed at angles no sensible farmer would choose. Old Mab Teague walked them every evening in August with a tin of crushed chalk, marking the windfalls she meant to keep.

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Her granddaughter Ruth came up from the village that year to help with the picking, and she thought the paths were a joke. Six ways out from each crossing, Mab said, so that a person lost in the trees could always find a star to stand in. Ruth laughed and went off with her basket. By the third week she had stopped laughing, because the wasps had got into the russets and the fog came up off the brook every morning, and she was lost twice before breakfast.

On the last night of the month Mab gave her a dark lantern and sent her to the centre of the star at the bottom field. Stand still, she said, and count the lines of light. Ruth stood with the lantern shut and the mist around her knees, and the pale rows of trees went out from her like the spokes of a wheel, each one dotted with fallen fruit that caught the moon. She counted until she knew the way home by heart.

She walked out at dawn with a basket of russets and never once looked at the paths again. When anyone asked Mab about it, she only said the orchard had never lost a person who could count.