Black ink tattoo of a skull filled with mandala patterns and roses, covering the inner forearm, in a fine line style.

Mandala skull and roses on forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A human skull is outlined across the forearm, with its eye sockets and jaw filled by intricate mandala motifs. Roses and leaves sit along the lower edge, and a large mandala rises above the skull. The work uses fine black linework with detailed hatching and no colour, and the composition wraps around the arm.

Geometric Botanical Forearm Skull Mandala Rose Leaves

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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 nearer, the lot of you, for the fire's the only honest thing left in Harrowmere, and the wind up on the ramparts has been counting our bones all evening. Mind the roof-slates, they come down if you lean. Now, the Ysolde window. You've all seen it, the great round one with no glass left, only stone lace round its rim. Everyone says the masons were clever, and they were. But the lace was not theirs to start with.

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Ysolde's husband Aldric went out to the salt marsh in the autumn of the great flood and never came back over the causeway. The steward wanted a plain slab for him, and the sexton wanted a skull carved above the arch, as was the custom for men lost to water. Ysolde would have neither. She took a mallet from the cart shed, climbed the scaffolding each dawn with a bowl of lamp oil and a nail, and cut a pattern into the sill. Round and round, petal inside petal, the way the shepherds' wives draw the moon on their doorposts to keep the damp out.

It took her three winters. The steward laughed at first, then stopped laughing when she showed him what she had made: a man's skull, brow and cheek and jaw, every socket filled with a bloom of tight curls, a rose cut where the teeth should have been, and leaves at its base as though something had grown up out of the bone. "Death is a thing you can plant," she told him, "if you don't mind the thorns."

On still nights, they say, you can hear her mallet from the marsh road, tap, tap, and then a long quiet while she counts the petals. I have never heard it myself. Old Osgood swears to it, and Osgood also swears he married a mermaid. Finish your ale. The wind is going round to the north.