Black ink line drawing of a mandala-style design with a scalloped band and a teardrop below, shown on a white card against weathered wood.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala design with scalloped border

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a symmetrical mandala motif hangs from a horizontal band of dots, scallops and solid bars. The inner half-circle is filled with swirls, petal shapes and small teardrops, with a single solid teardrop beneath it. The design is drawn in uniform black on white paper, centred on a pale wooden backdrop.

Mandala Scallop Dot Teardrop Swirl Border Symmetrical design

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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

Sit nearer the fire, the wind off the sound takes half of what I say. You want the story of the stern-board on the Little Hope? Then hush, and mind the kettle, it has opinions.

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Tomas Gorry ran the only paint shop on Inish Mara, and what he sold was mostly tar and lamp oil. But every spring a sack of henna came over on the Thursday boat, and he would crush it in a bowl with lemon and tea until it smelled like a summer nobody here had lived. With it he made the patterns the old women loved, a half-circle of swirls and petals with a band of dots above it, like stitches holding up a hem. He would never paint a full ring. A full ring, he said, was for people who had finished deciding things.

Maeve Ferris came to him the week before the regatta with a commission as long as the pier. She wanted it on the stern-board of her father's boat, scallops thick enough to catch the light, and at the bottom a single black drop hanging like a bead of rain that never got round to falling. Tomas worked through the afternoon while gulls argued on the shed roof, and when he finished he stood back with the brush in his mouth and said nothing at all, which on this island is the highest praise there is.

The boat went out in the regatta and came back last, which everyone agreed was the paint's fault. Her father swore the design slowed them down, that the sea read it as a question and took its time answering. Maeve only laughed and said the drop was the part that mattered. Every other line on that board was a copy of something older, she said, but the drop was hers, and it would hang there until the salt wore it off.