Black and grey mandala-style flower tattoo with dotwork detailing on the shoulder of a person wearing a cream knitted jumper.

Mandala flower tattoo on a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey mandala-style flower sits on the top of the shoulder, with layered petals built from fine outlines, stippled dots and soft grey shading. The design is centred on the shoulder and fills most of the upper frame. The photograph is a close crop with warm, low light against a pale textured wall, and only the lips and chin are visible.

Dotwork Botanical Shoulder Mandala Flower Lotus Petal Shoulder

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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 counting stones since the frost broke. The rose window of Harlow Keep lies in the nave in forty-one pieces, and the abbey clerk wants a drawing by Michaelmas. Each petal is a ring of smaller petals, and each edge is pricked with dots where the old carvers set their points.

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You sit on an upturned bucket with a sheet of trace paper and a hard pencil while the rain comes sideways through the open tracery. Mrs Ashdown, who keeps the key to the gatehouse, brings you tea in a jam jar and tells you the window was made for the sea side of the castle, so that the sun would come up through it at dawn. You begin to understand that the mason was not making a flower at all. He was making a sun that would break into a thousand small pieces, and he cut every dot so the light would have somewhere to land.

On the ninth day you find the centre stone under a drift of ivy, the one with the little hollow where a bead of coloured glass once sat. You fit it into the mullions with your thumbs and feel the whole ring settle, petal over petal, until nothing wobbles and nothing falls.

That evening you walk out past the empty arch as the sun drops into the water. The light comes through the open stonework and throws a scatter of bright dots across the flagstones, and you follow them with your boot, one by one, until the last of them goes out.