Black and grey mandala tattoo on the top of a woman's shoulder, with layered petals and geometric detail, photographed outdoors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on a shoulder

Dotwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala design with layered petals and radiating geometric rings sits on the top of the shoulder. The patterns are built from fine linework and dense dots, shaded in black and grey. The photo is taken outdoors beside a planter, with the subject's face out of frame.

Dotwork Geometric Shoulder Mandala Flower Petal Ring

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

Mind the step, and keep your hands in your lap, for the old woman's bones are cold and so is the lamp. You want the story of the Petal Court, which is the one about the rings, so listen. The ship Harrow Bloom had nine decks wound round one another like the leaves of a closed flower, and each turned at its own pace, so a child on the outermost ring could be a grandmother by the time her cousin on the hub finished her first lesson.

Keep reading

Their cartographer was a woman called Imre Solvang, who drew the orbits in ink on sheets of thin hide, because paper had rotted in the first century and nobody trusted anything that could not be scraped clean and reused. She drew the rings as circles, then as petals, then as the points where petals met, until the chart looked like something pressed in a book of lost prayers. The council wanted a map of where the water ran. Imre drew instead where the light fell, hour by hour, across every garden on every deck.

When the drought came in the ninth year of the turning, the council ordered the lights dimmed to save the cells, and the gardens began to curl at their edges. Imre went up through the rings with a lantern and her hide sheets and walked the petals one by one. The dim light lay in the same places each day, and where it lay the roots had gone deep and sweet. She painted a single line from hub to rim, and the council moved the seedbeds along it. Nobody thanked her. The rim garden still blooms, and they say the line is there still, if you know how to look.

So when you go up to the ring gardens, look down at the paving. You'll see a dark mark where her lantern always stood, round as a mandala, and the children chalk around it every spring. That is the whole of the story, and the lamp is nearly out, so off you go.