Forearm with a blue-grey mandala tattoo near the wrist, the hand holding a thin cigarette over sandy ground.

Mandala tattoo on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a hand holding a thin cigarette above a sandy surface, with silver rings on several fingers. A band of ornamental mandala-style linework in blue-grey ink runs across the inner forearm and wrist, with a further design partly visible at the bottom edge. The ink is faded and the image is mostly neutral tones with warm skin and sunlight on the ground.

Forearm Mandala Ornament Hand Ring Cigarette

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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

The fair came to Hollin Moor every August, when the ground had baked hard enough to hold a carousel's footings and the grass had given up. Old Marrow ran the lucky-dip tent and never once let anyone see the bottom of his box. Children said the rings in it were worth more than their weight in silver, and the grown-ups said nothing, because they had all tried to buy one and been refused.

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The year the drought came, a girl called Tansy walked in off the road with nothing but a stick and a bag of sand. She sat on the dry ground outside the tent and began to draw. Her lines were careful, looping inward like the petals of a flower that had decided to be a clock, and each time she finished a ring she pressed a small stone into its centre. By dusk there were forty rings in the dust, and the wind had not moved one of them.

Marrow came out to shout her off the common. He stood at the edge of her pattern and looked down a long time. Then he took a silver ring from his waistcoat pocket, the one he had never shown anyone, and set it in the middle of her largest circle without a word. The dust under it was suddenly cool and dark, and the fair's engines started up for the first time in three days.

That is how the fair learned that rings are not for keeping. Tansy's lines are still there under the grass, fading a little every summer, and nobody on Hollin Moor walks across them.