Woman in a black strappy dress showing a black ornate ornament tattoo on her upper back and a black mandala tattoo on her forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and ornament tattoos on back and forearm

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera wears a black dress with crossed straps and raises one arm. A dense black ornamental motif sits at the top of her back near the nape, and a radial black mandala is on her forearm, with henna-style patterning visible on her hand. The linework is fine and symmetrical, with solid black areas and detailed inner fills, shown against a blurred green and stone outdoor background.

Geometric Back Forearm Mandala Ornament Henna

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

Your uncle does not allow you to climb the Bramleys until you can draw a circle without lifting the compass, so for a week you practise on the backs of seed packets while the wasps drone over the windfalls in the long grass. He says every orchard is a drawing. Rows are only lines until you bend them into rings, and rings are what keep the wind from knocking the crop flat.

Keep reading

On the Thursday he takes you to the old medlar at the bottom of the field, the one nobody has pruned since your grandmother died. Its trunk is split and soft with a sweet smell of rot. Hanging from a fork is a grey paper nest the size of a cabbage, and when he lifts a branch you see the cells spiralling outward from a single hollow at the centre, each ring a little wider than the last, every wasp walking the same tidy geometry without anyone telling it how. Your uncle says the queen starts it alone in spring, with nothing but a mouthful of chewed wood and patience.

You want to say that is cheating, that a wasp has no compass. Instead you pick up the windfall at your feet, cut it through the middle with your penknife, and lay the halves face down on the grass. The star of seeds inside each one has five points, the same from every angle. Your uncle says nothing, which is how you know he is pleased. By dusk you have drawn a circle on the seed packet without lifting the compass, and the ink has not smudged.