Black ink mandala tattoo with dotwork border on a tanned shoulder, with a beach and sea behind.

Mandala tattoo on a shoulder at the beach

Geometric · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A tanned shoulder and upper back show a black ink mandala with a circular central rosette, triangular geometric panels and a scalloped dotted border. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled dots filling the border and the spaces between petals. The tattoo is shown in black ink only against warm skin, with a black bikini strap crossing below it and a blurred sea and sky behind.

Geometric Dotwork Shoulder Mandala Rosette Dot Geometric pattern Border Beach

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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 tide clock in the hall of Brackwater House has stopped at twenty past four again, and you are the only one in the house who knows how to coax it. You stand on the hall stool, unscrew the brass face and tip out a little drift of sand that has crept under the front door since the last equinox. Your fingers smell of salt and machine oil. Downstairs, Mrs Pellow is shouting about the kippers.

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Every guest who comes down for breakfast looks at the carpet before they look at the sea. It is a rosette of rust and cream, a ring of petals with triangles pointing outward like the rays of a sun that has been folded and pressed flat. Your grandmother laid that carpet the year the house opened, counting threads in circles on her knees. She taught you to count the same way: forty-two dots to a rain-soaked afternoon, sixteen to a gull's cry, nine to a bad night. The scalloped border around the edge is where she kept the house's history.

The lodger on the top floor, Mr Anselm Dray, a retired surveyor with ink on every cuff, has been drawing the rug on squared paper for a month. This morning he slides the sheet under the clock without a word. The centre of his drawing is not a sun. It is the pinhole a surveyor makes where a cliff was first measured, and the rings around it line up exactly with the tide marks scratched inside the clock case.

You wind the clock, set the hands to the real water, and the brass face starts to tick. Below, the rug catches the light from the door, and the rosette seems, for a moment, to turn.