Black and grey dotwork and linework mandala tattoo covering the scalp of a shaved head, photographed from behind against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo across a shaved head

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala with a central flower motif fills most of the scalp, with layered petals, scrolls and teardrop shapes radiating outwards. The design combines fine black linework with stippled dotwork shading that creates tonal depth in the petals and borders. It is entirely black and grey, set against a plain black backdrop with the top and back of the head filling the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Other Mandala Flower Petal Scroll Dot Pattern

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

The tide on Skerra Mhor came in at the same minute every day for as long as anyone kept the book, and my grandmother used every minute of its absence. She knelt on the wet sand below the chapel with a bone stylus cut from a gannet's wing and a pocket of grit, and she drew a circle the width of a cart, then began filling it. Dots first. She said the dots were the patient part and the lines were only showing off.

Keep reading

I was nine when she let me hold the stylus. My job was to count the petals aloud so she could keep the rings in step: eight outer teardrops, sixteen scrolls, then a centre like a seed head with a star cut into it. The sea pushed its first thin fingers across the bottom edge while we worked, and she never hurried. "It isn't meant to last," she said. "It's meant to be made."

When the ferry stopped running in the autumn, the island emptied, and by spring I was the only one left who could draw the centre without a stencil. The ferryman's boy asked me once why anyone would spend a whole morning on something the water took back by teatime. I told him the water had never once finished it. Each evening the sea rubbed the petals to nothing, and each low tide I drew them again, a little differently, the way she had.

I still do it on the sand, though nobody watches now. Last month a woman from the mainland filmed me and posted it, and a stranger wrote that the dots looked like they were breathing. I didn't tell her the dots were the only part that mattered, or that the tide finished the picture every night by laying its own ring of wrack around mine.