Black and grey mandala-style flower tattoo with dotwork shading on the inner upper arm, with the arm raised.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala flowers on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large central flower with layered petals and a smaller rose-like bloom above it, linked by geometric star shapes and small dots. Fine linework and stippled dotwork build the shading, with soft grey wash behind the motifs. The image is a close crop in black and grey, with the arm raised and the rest of the body partly out of frame.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Upper arm Flower Mandala Rose Dot Star

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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 closer, the wind up here has teeth, and I have only one good story left in me before the bell goes. You will want to hear about Mistress Aldith's garden, the one inside the walls of Harrowgate Keep, where nothing was allowed to grow in a straight line.

Keep reading

She drew her beds on the flagstones with a knuckle of chalk: a great ring of points like a compass rose, and at its centre a flower with layered petals, each row tucked under the last. Between the petals she pressed dots of river pebble, one for every morning her husband did not ride home from the border. Her gardener, a boy called Tobin with ink on his thumbs, thought she was mad. He planted what she asked: a rose the colour of old pennies at the top, a lotus-faced bloom below, and at each point of the star a small black seed.

Autumn came and the rain washed the chalk away, so each morning she drew it again. Tobin noticed the dots never sat in the same place twice. One dawn he found the whole ring had shifted a hand's width east, and the rose had bent toward the gatehouse as if listening for hooves. He said nothing. He only cut the lines deeper with his trowel.

The rider came up the valley road in spring, dusty and whole, and walked straight past the roses to the chalk ring. He knelt and counted the dots with one finger. Then he laughed, and the old woman laughed with him, and the garden, they say, never needed chalk again. Mind the step on your way down. It is steeper than it looks.