Black and grey blackwork mandala armband tattoo with geometric bands on a person's wrist and lower forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala armband tattoo on a wrist

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a wrist and lower forearm with a band-style tattoo made of a mandala-inspired ornament. The design combines solid bands, a half-sun or arch motif, and symmetrical scrollwork and geometric shapes. Bold black linework and solid fills stand out against the pale skin, and the image is framed tightly on the arm with the hand and a denim skirt visible.

Blackwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Armband Ornament Arch Scrollwork Band

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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

You have been up the scaffold since six, and the ballroom below is still giving off floor polish and last night's cigarettes. Mrs Okafor, who keeps the books and the keys, wants the proscenium arch finished before Saturday's dance, and she has handed you a brass tray from her mother's kitchen as the pattern. Nobody else at the Palais has bothered to look at it properly.

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The tray has a ring of petals around a half-sun, and a band of little triangles that look like teeth. You trace it onto tissue paper with a carbon pencil, then rule the bands across the plaster in black enamel, thick enough to read from the balcony. Mr Pryce from the council says it looks like a funeral wreath. You tell him the dancers will see it from the floor and won't mind what it reminds him of.

Saturday comes. The band catches the bulbs, and the scrollwork curls down the arch as if it is following the couples round the floor. Mrs Okafor stands at the foot of the stairs with her hand on the rail, counting the people who walk in beneath it. Nobody asks who painted it.

After the last waltz you climb back up with a rag and a tin of turpentine to wipe a drip from the lowest curl. The paint is still soft in the middle, and where your thumb rested on the plaster there is a print of your own whorls in black. You leave it. Someday a couple will stand under that arch and never know which mark is yours.