Black dotwork and geometric mandala tattoo with a solid triangle on the inner forearm, shown with the hand open and palm up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and triangle forearm tattoo

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the forearm with a symmetrical mandala-style design built from stacked arches, pointed petals and a central star-like motif. The linework is built up from fine dots and stippling, with solid black triangles adding contrast, and the ink is black with grey shading. The composition runs from the elbow down toward the wrist, with the open hand and a wooden floor visible in the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Triangle Star Arch Petal Dot

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

Tomas had pricked the pattern for the north rose window of St Brannock's three times before the storm, and each time the holes had drifted out of true by the width of a fishhook. Old Gwen Pascoe blamed the paper, damp off the harbour wall, but Tomas knew it was his hand. He laid the drawing flat on the bench in the glazier's loft, weighted its corners with four lead offcuts, and went through it again with the awl, counting rings the way his grandfather had taught him: outer arches, petal points, the star, then the heart.

Keep reading

By dusk the loft smelled of linseed and wet slate. He dusted charcoal through the holes onto the new glass, a fine grey stipple that bloomed into the dotted border, and when he lifted the paper the star sat square at the centre as if it had always been there. The solid triangles were the hard part. He had cut them from blue-black glass that drank the light, and they had to sit exactly where the arches met, or the whole mandala would lean like a boat on a slack rope.

Gwen climbed the ladder at nine with a flask and found him still kneeling on the boards, lead came in his lap, one triangle held up to the window. She didn't ask whether it was right. She looked at the light coming through the blank circle and said the men on the breakwater would see it from their boats, and Tomas, who had waited all week for someone to say that, took the flask down to the quay and sat with it until the lamps came on.