Black and grey photograph of a fine line mandala heart tattoo on the side of the torso beside a fine line mandala yin yang tattoo on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala heart and yin yang tattoos

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos are shown in a black and white photograph. On the left, a heart is built from ornamental mandala and paisley-style motifs, including a flower-like rosette, drawn in fine black linework. On the right, a yin yang symbol has its two halves filled with intricate floral and swirl patterns, with a small rosette in the lower section, and the composition places both designs side by side on skin.

Fine line Ribs Upper arm Heart Yin yang Mandala Flower Paisley

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

Nadia had the lift out again, so I climbed eleven floors with my pen case under one arm and a roll of tracing paper under the other. Dara was waiting on the landing with the door propped open by a bucket of sand, the way she'd done since we were fifteen on the Ashgrove estate.

Keep reading

We spent the afternoon at her kitchen table with a compass, a ruler and a stack of library books on Gujarati block prints. She wanted a heart made of flowers, because her gran's heart was the only thing on the stairwell wall that nobody had ever tagged. I wanted a circle, because a circle was the one shape I could draw without a ruler. We argued over whether the dark half should hold the rosette or the paisley. In the end I drew a small flower no bigger than a fingernail in the lower bowl, and Dara laughed and said it was the only honest bit of the whole design.

Dara moved to Leeds in March and took the heart with her to a studio where a woman with silver rings traced it onto her side. I kept my drawing taped inside the cupboard door above the kettle. Every morning I looked at that circle, its two halves crowded with swirls, and I thought they were the two of us, one dark and one light, neither of us willing to be the tidy version.

The lift was fixed in May. I didn't ride it. I took the stairs on purpose, counting the landings, and on the eleventh I crouched by the door and drew a small crooked heart in chalk on the concrete, so that whoever lived there next would know someone had been happy on that floor.