Black and grey full sleeve tattoo on an upper arm, with a mandala on the shoulder and a serpent over geometric bands.

Mandala shoulder and serpent sleeve on upper arm

Geometric · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A man's arm and shoulder carry a full sleeve tattoo. A large mandala-style flower covers the shoulder, while a serpent or dragon-like creature with flowing scales winds down the upper arm above ornate banded patterns. The work uses fine black linework and grey shading against the pale skin, with no colour ink.

Geometric Shoulder Upper arm Mandala Serpent Dragon Flower Wave Geometric pattern Scale Band

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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

The spade rang against something under the damson roots, a flat hollow note that nothing in this clay should make. Dev, who had come to clear the bindweed and had complained about the clay since breakfast, knelt and brushed the soil away with his sleeve. Beneath it was a tin tray, black with age, and on it a serpent in ridged bands, coiled around a flower made of concentric rings.

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My grandmother had painted just such a flower on the hall tiles of the house in Pinner, and she used to say the water snake kept the rain off the roots. I had forgotten that until the tray came up in my hands. The scales were stamped, not painted, each one bitten into the metal by someone who had done this a thousand times, and the wave lines at the rim had worn almost smooth where a thumb had rubbed them.

We lifted it out between us and found a second tray beneath, then a third, each a band of the same pattern, stacked like the rings of a felled tree. Dev wanted to take them to the scrap man in Harrow. I told him to wait until the frost, when the ground would stop pretending it had nothing to hide.

That evening I set marigolds in a ring over the hollow, the orange ones my grandmother liked, and pressed the soil flat with my palms. Dev asked why I was planting over good ground. I said the snake had been holding this bed together for longer than either of us, and he could go and fight the bindweed himself.