Black ink mandala tattoo with a radiating geometric pattern on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink mandala sits on the inner forearm, with a radiating, flower-like design built from layered petals, rings and a central star. The linework is fine and uniform, with some solid black areas and dotted shading in the inner sections. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain, dark background and a light striped top.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Mandala Flower Pattern Star Ornament

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

Mesa the weaver had been ordered to finish the cloth before the Nile rose, and she had nothing but a basket of undyed flax and a pattern scratched on a broken potsherd by her grandmother. The sherd showed a flower with petals folded inside petals, and at its centre a star with eight points. "Make it the way the water makes it," her grandmother had said, which was no help at all.

Keep reading

She sat by the river each morning and watched the eddies spin off the reeds. Where a stone broke the current, the water turned in rings that closed on themselves, each one thinner than the one outside it. She drew them in the mud with a stick. A boatman called Anu laughed at her from his punt and asked whether she meant to sell her cloth to the fish.

On the ninth morning she wove from the centre outward, so the star came first and the petals last, counting each knot against the turning water she could see through the reeds. When the cloth was cut from the loom the overseer found no seam and no loose thread, only a flower that seemed to shift a little whenever the lamplight moved across it.

The overseer wanted the cloth for the temple. Mesa asked only that the stone at the bend be left where it lay, since it was the thing that made the water's pattern. He agreed, grumbling. That evening Anu tied a strip of the spare flax around his wrist, and by dusk the river had made its rings again.