Black linework mandala and paisley tattoo on the side of the torso, with blue, purple and pink watercolour-style washes and drips.

Mandala and paisley linework with watercolour splashes

Geometric · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black linework mandala with a central ring of scrolls sits beside paisley and swirl motifs, all drawn in fine, even outlines. Soft blue, purple and pink washes bleed around the lower half of the design, with thin coloured drips running down from them. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against plain skin, with a dark garment edge across the top.

Geometric Fine line Ribs Mandala Paisley Swirl Watercolour splash Drip Scroll

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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

The bread was late again, and Marta Holm stood in the dark yard with the flour sacks, counting the loaves the way her grandmother had taught her, by touch rather than by sight. The oven had been cold since midnight. Her brother said the old stone wanted a sacrifice of patience, and she had told him patience was what the village already had too much of.

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When the fire finally caught, it caught all at once, and she saw the paper pinned above the flour bin, a drawing a traveller had left in payment for a week's lodging. It was a wheel of looping lines, a ring of scrolls around an empty centre, and beside it a teardrop shape curling like a sleeping cat. The traveller had called it a map of how the day turns. Marta had thought it nonsense, but she had kept it, because the lines were so fine and even that they seemed to have been drawn by someone with nothing else to do.

At first light she took the first tray out and found that the wheel had printed itself onto the crust, a ring of pale swirls where the heat had lifted the flour. She dipped her brush in the blue dye her brother used for the cloth stalls and let it run down the side of the bread the way the traveller's map had run down the paper. Nobody in the village bought it. Her brother said so. But the next morning a small girl came asking for the bread that looked like weather, and Marta gave her one, and the ink-coloured drips ran all the way down to the girl's wrist.