Black and grey mandala and rose tattoo covering the upper arm and shoulder, with dotwork shading and fine linework.

Mandala and rose sleeve on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large sleeve tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder, centred on a rose and a layered mandala-style flower with leaves. The rose at the top is shaded with stippled dots, while the mandala and the scrolling patterns lower down are drawn in clean, fine outlines. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink against a dark background, with the subject photographed from the side and the face not shown.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Rose Mandala Flower Leaves Paisley Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamps in the Ninth Terrace were kept low so the old women could sit in the dark and tell us what the sea used to be. Mother Oyelaran wrapped her hands around a cup of warm barley water and said that before the Drowning, people carved their skins with ink because the world outside the domes was too grey to bear. She said it the way she always did, as if she were passing a stone from palm to palm.

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There was a surveyor named Teodor Vance who walked the salt flats past the old Lisbon wall. He carried a brass compass that did not point north any more, only toward whatever he had lost. On the fourth night he found a rose, and it was not a real rose, but a flat round thing cut from a steel plate, its petals layered like a flower opening in slow motion. Beside it lay a ring of lace worked in tiny dots, and beneath the dots, lines so fine a grain of sand could have shattered them. He sat with it until the frost came, copying each line onto the back of his ration card with a sliver of charcoal.

When he returned to the Terrace, the Council asked what he had brought back. He unfolded the card. The rose was there in its stippled shadows, the mandala turning around it like a clock with no hours, and the scrolls spilling down toward the edge of the paper. Nobody could tell him what it meant. Old Oyelaran only traced the outermost ring with one finger and said, very quietly, that it was a map of a garden, and that someone had drawn it on purpose so that we would know where the gardens had been.