Black dotwork mandala tattoo with a radiating petal pattern on the forearm, beside a grey knitted sweater sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A circular mandala with a central flower-like shape and layered rings of petals sits on the forearm. The design is built from fine black linework and stippled dots, giving a detailed, symmetrical pattern. The ink is dark and monochrome against pale skin, with a grey knit sleeve and a metal bracelet at the edges of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Pattern Circle

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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 closer, little ones, and mind the lamp, for this is the tale of the Mason of Hesk, in the kingdom of Orrowmere, which stood where the river Tallen bends, and which no map has ever held.

Keep reading

The king of Orrowmere had a palace with no doors, only arches, and he wanted a floor for his throne room that would make a man lose his way. So he sent for the Mason, a woman called Idrenne, whose hands were grey with dust and whose eyes were sharp as a pricking needle. She worked a full year on a single circle. Every petal was counted, every dot set down by hand, a thousand dots to a ring, and the rings turned inward like the petals of a sleeping lily.

On the last morning the king came to see it, and his steward asked why the centre was bare, a pale lotus the size of a cupped palm with no ink at all. Idrenne said the king had asked for a pattern with no beginning. A pattern with no beginning must have no first mark, she said, and so she had left the first mark out.

The king laughed, then stopped laughing, because the morning sun came through the high arch and fell exactly on that bare centre, and the whole floor seemed to open like a flower around a single pool of light. They say the king paid her in gold, and she spent none of it. She gave it to the river, walked home to Hesk, and the floor is still there, though the palace is long gone. Stand in the bare place and look up, and you will see the light, which is the only part of Orrowmere you can still touch.