Black and grey mandala tattoo on the chest of a person in a black cutout dress, with script and other small tattoos on the legs.

Mandala tattoo on chest beneath a black cutout dress

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop shows a person from the neck to the upper thighs wearing a black dress with strappy cutouts. A small, ornate mandala-style tattoo sits on the upper chest within a cutout, and a fine script tattoo is visible on the lower leg. Black and grey linework and shading show against pale skin in bright, washed-out natural light.

Chest Calf Thigh Mandala Script Cat Ornament

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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 rain came in sideways on Scarra that October, and my father spent three nights at the kitchen table with a pair of brass compasses and a sheet of cartridge paper, trying to fit one circle inside another without the lines touching. He was a joiner, not a draughtsman. The chapel roof needed a rose window, and the minister had promised the mainland committee it would be finished by Easter.

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I held the lamp for him. Each time the point slipped, he swore in Gaelic and started again from the centre, and each time the pattern came out a little more crooked and a little more beautiful. By the fourth night he had eight petals, then sixteen, then a ring of small lozenges that didn't belong to anything he'd been taught. He called them the dull stars. I thought they were the best thing in the room.

The window was never finished. In March the boat from Oban brought the glass, forty crates of it, and the crate with the centre piece slid off the slipway and went under the harbour wall. Twelve pieces, blue and ochre, were lost to the weed. My father sat on that wall with the drawing folded inside his coat and would not speak for a week.

Years later I found the sheet in his toolbox, soft as cloth at the folds. I copied the dull stars onto a scrap of card and pinned it above the sink. Nobody on the island asks what it is. They only ask whether the tide will be out for the Thursday ferry, and I tell them what the lamp taught me: start from the centre and keep the point steady.