Black and grey mandala tattoo covering a forearm, with dotwork and fine line petals and geometric rosettes.

Mandala sleeve on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is covered in a dense sleeve of overlapping mandala-style motifs, including lotus-like petals, rosettes and leaf shapes. The work combines fine line detail with dense dotwork stippling to build up shading and texture. The ink is entirely black and grey on a light background of a white wall and dark clothing.

Dotwork Geometric Fine line Forearm Mandala Lotus Rosette Leaf Petal Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lord's wall came down in the winter of the great frost, and by spring the stones lay in the moat where the carp grew fat and slow. Hanna, the mason's daughter, was sent down with a basket to lift out the ones that bore carving, because her father said a stone with a face on it was worth more than a stone with none.

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Most were plain. One was a window piece as broad as a cartwheel, cut with a rosette of eight petals, each petal filled with tiny pricked holes, and at its heart a lotus folded in on itself like a closed hand. Hanna sat on the bank with it three days. She pressed a thorn into wet linen and copied the holes one by one, dot after dot, until her thumbs were black with charcoal and the petals on the cloth seemed to look back at her from every side.

On the fourth morning the steward came down the bank to ask why the cart was not yet loaded. He saw the linen and said the lord would pay for it. She said the lord had already been paid, in full, by the stone. He laughed, then stopped laughing, because the moat had gone very still and the carp had turned to face them all.

She carried the linen home and her father pinned it above the hearth. When the new gate was hung that summer, he cut the rosette into the oak exactly as she had drawn it, and in the rain, if you stood at the gate with the water running off the lintel, the petals seemed to open a little wider each year.