Colour tattoo of a dotwork mandala flower with orange petals, teal edges and mauve shading on a forearm, with a small geometric arrow design below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala flower tattoo on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A circular mandala flower sits on the forearm, built from layered petals with a dotted centre and a dense ring of outer petals. The linework is bold and dark, with stippled dotwork shading in the petals and centre. The ink is mainly orange and yellow with teal and mauve accents, and the design fills most of the frame against a plain skin background, with a partial geometric arrow tattoo at the lower left edge.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Mandala Flower Sunflower Petal Dot Arrow Diamond

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

Dear Nell,

Keep reading

The sunflowers came up in the walled garden the week after the frost. Mr Gorse says they are the last of the old seed, the one his father brought back from the coast before the castle roof came down. He has us sowing them in rings now, a circle inside a circle, so the bed looks like the face of a pocket watch. I thought it was fancy nonsense until I stood in the middle of it at dusk.

Every flower turns its face to the broken east window, where the sun gets in first. By six o'clock the whole ring is nodding the same way, petals gone the colour of marmalade, and the teal-striped lupins behind them look almost blue. Mr Gorse says it is only the habit of young stems. I say it looks like a congregation waiting for the bell.

Last Thursday I saved the seed heads, picking the seeds out one by one with a bent hairpin and dropping them into a saucer. The centre of each head is packed with them, dark and pricked, as if someone had gone over the dish with a fine nib. I counted eighty-one in the first and gave up on the rest. Mr Gorse laughed and said a sunflower never runs out of things to say.

I've put a dozen in an envelope, wrapped in the tissue from Mother's drawer. Plant them where the light comes in first. Write and tell me which way they turn.

Love, Ada