Symmetrical mandala drawn in purple, magenta and teal ink on paper in a spiral sketchbook, with a design that could work as a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala drawing in purple and teal ink

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A circular mandala is drawn in fine ink on white paper, with layered petal shapes radiating from a central rosette. The linework is dense and decorative, with small dots and curls filling the petals, and the design is built from repeated symmetrical motifs. The ink is purple, magenta and teal, and the drawing fills most of the frame with the spiral edge of a notebook visible at the top.

Geometric Mandala Floral Petal Ornament Rosette Symmetry

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

You start where the ink is thickest, at the rosette, because your gran said that's where everything begins, and because the bus from Piccadilly has forty minutes of empty road before the depot. The notebook is spiral-bound and rests on your knee, its cardboard back gone soft from three winters. Purple first, with the fine nib, then magenta for the second ring of petals, then teal for the wash of pattern that fills the gaps between them.

Keep reading

Every petal repeats the one before it, eight at a time, so you only have to decide once. Dot, curl, dot. Outside, the wet windows of Oxford Road slide past: a kebab shop lit like an aquarium, a man asleep under a bus shelter advert for car insurance. The driver, Malik, hums along to the radio and taps the wheel at red lights. He has watched you draw these for months and never asks what they are for.

By Ardwick the outer ring is nearly finished, the purple petals scalloped and dense as lace. You count them under your breath, sixteen, and realise there is one extra on the last quarter, a petal that fits nowhere else. You could rub it out with the stub of your eraser. Instead you let it sit a little crooked, a fraction heavier than the rest.

The bus swings into the depot yard, the lights hum off, and you hold the page up under the yellow sodium glow. The mandala looks back at you, perfect except for that one petal leaning out toward the edge, as if it has somewhere else to be. You close the notebook gently and sit a moment longer, the ink still wet.