Colour Neo-trad tattoo of a layered yellow, orange and brown flower with green scalloped petals and black dots, on the upper arm, with a close-up beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala-style flower on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A layered flower sits at the centre of a dotted, mandala-like design, with yellow, orange and brown petals radiating from a small dark centre. Green scalloped leaves with cut-out openings frame the bloom, and small black dots sit around it. The left image shows the full tattoo on the arm, and the right image is a close-up showing the petal shading and bold black outlines.

Neo-trad Upper arm Flower Mandala Petal Leaves Dot Bloom

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

You have been at the booth since six, and the tin on the steel counter is the one thing in the queue that refuses to make sense. Inside it, folded in tissue gone the colour of weak tea, are dahlia seeds, a few dried heads, and a sheaf of notes in a hand you only half read. The man in front of you keeps saying it is for his mother, as if that closes the matter, and his coat is soaked through from the platform.

Keep reading

You turn the tin over. Someone has written the varieties on the lid in careful capitals, then drawn a bloom in green ink: layered petals ringed by scalloped leaves with small windows cut out of them, and a scatter of dots around the edge like a compass rose that has come loose. The date beneath is from a year that feels like someone else's life.

Your supervisor wants it logged as plant material and sent to the quarantine shed. You could do that. Instead you dial the number pencilled under the drawing, and a woman answers in the middle of a sentence about slugs. Her husband drew the pattern the summer before he died, she says, and the dots are where he pressed his thumb into the bed to mark each row. She has never managed to make the flowers come out the same twice.

You stamp the tin released and write her name in the box marked remarks. When the crate is lifted onto the van, the lid catches the sodium light, and you think of the thumbprints, one for every row, a garden kept exactly as he left it. The man is already gone, and you are still holding the pen.