Black and grey mandala flower tattoo with layered petals and shading on the side of a torso, above the ribs.

Mandala flower tattoo on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a mandala-style flower sits on the side of the torso, with a dense outer ring of pointed petals around a central rosette. The linework is fine and defined, with soft grey shading filling the petals and a lighter centre. The close crop places the design in the middle of the frame, with a dark blue top pulled aside to show the skin.

Botanical Ribs Mandala Flower Petal Rosette

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

The judges had measured the dahlia twice by the time Mr Pell reached for his brass rule a third time. Edie Marsh stopped pretending to sort sweet pea packets behind the counter of Dunning's Seed Merchants and watched the old man lay the rule across the bloom as if it might bite. Outside, the Saturday market was packing up under a sky the colour of wet slate, and the last bus to Lessing had already gone without her.

Keep reading

Her father had grown the flower from a tuber his brother posted from Lincolnshire, and he had raised it in the yard behind the shop with the patience of a man who trusted nobody to hurry a thing. Every petal sat in a ring around the next, pointed and overlapping, dark at the tips and pale at the root, until the whole head folded inward on a small pale rosette at its centre. Edie had counted the rings most mornings. Seven outer, three inner, and the heart like a window seen from underneath.

Mr Pell lifted the bloom from its bowl and turned it towards the light from the door. "Forty-one petals on this ring," he said, "and the spacing is wrong." Edie opened her mouth, then closed it. Her father was out back unloading sacks, and she could hear him humming the hymn he always hummed when he expected bad news.

She crossed the shop before anyone could stop her, took the dahlia gently from Mr Pell's fingers, and carried it to the window. She set it on the sill, where the thin sun came through the petals and threw a ring of shadow across the counter, fine and exact as a compass drawn in ink. "Count them now," she said. Mr Pell leaned close, and for a long moment nobody said anything at all.