Black ink drawing of a geometric tattoo design with a dotted mandala, leaves and small flowers beneath overlapping triangle lines, shown on white paper.

Mandala and geometric lines design with leaves

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing of a tattoo design on white paper, with a Staedtler pen lying across the lower right corner. A dotted mandala surrounded by layered leaves and small flowers sits at the centre, with a long spike extending downwards and stippled dots trailing beside it. Fine hatched and dotted linework appears above the mandala, where overlapping triangles and dashed lines form a geometric frame.

Geometric Botanical Dotwork Mandala Leaves Flower Triangle Dot Spike Geometric line

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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

Sit nearer the fire, and keep your hood up, because the wind on this side of the pass likes to lean in and listen. You came for the Needle Pass, so you'll have the old version, the one my grandmother told with her hands flat on the table, not the one the coach companies print.

Keep reading

Long before there was a road, a surveyor called Tomas Greave came up from the lowlands with a brass rule, a pot of ink and a poor opinion of mountains. He drew every peak as a triangle, because triangles were honest, he said, and every ridge as a straight line laid over the one before it. By the time he reached the stone ring at the foot of the saddle, his map looked like a spider had been trapped in a window. The ring itself was lichen and dew and a spray of wild flowers that grew nowhere else, and he drew that too, petal by petal, until the ink ran out in a dark spot in the middle.

Then the first snow came early, and his straight lines stopped matching anything. The peaks he'd drawn sat half a day west of where he stood. So he did what the shepherds did and followed the cairns, small piles of stone set every few hundred paces, which looked like dots on a page. He wrote each one into his ledger, one dot after another, and the dotted line wandered where no ruler would ever go.

He came down into the valley on the sixth morning with frostbite on two fingers and a ledger full of leaves pressed flat between the pages. He never drew the pass straight again. The inn at the foot of it still has his map on the wall, the dotted route running off the edge of the paper. Hold it to a candle and the dots look like footprints, and the footprints lead back up.