Black and grey mandala tattoo in dotwork and fine line covering the back of a hand and down the middle finger.

Mandala tattoo on the back of a hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala with radiating petals and lattice detail covers the back of the hand, with the design continuing as a narrow band of pattern down the middle finger. The work is built from dense dotwork stippling and fine black linework, with shading that gives the petals depth. The image is shot against a black background in greyscale, with the hand centred and fully in frame.

Dotwork Geometric Hand Mandala Ornament Geometric pattern Lattice Petal Finger tattoo

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

The lock-keeper's daughter at Hollin Cut had a habit of counting things when she was frightened, and the night the coal barge Mercy Bell came down the canal with no one at the tiller, she counted the rivets on its bow, then the lamps, then the rings of the sluice wheel. There were forty-one rivets and nine lamps, and the wheel had eleven rings worn pale where the rope ran. Her father was asleep in the cottage with a bad chest. She went down the towpath with the lantern held low.

Keep reading

The barge was empty except for a man lying across the hatch cover, one hand flat on the wood as if feeling for a heartbeat in it. His palm was patterned all over in black, a round flower of petals opening out from the wrist, and the petals were split and stitched again with lace and little stars, and the lace ran down his middle finger in narrow bands like the walls of a well. She had never seen such a thing on a man. She had seen it once on the stone of the old chapel gate, where the carvers used to mark the hours.

"You have to close the gate," he said, without opening his eyes. "Somebody has to turn the wheel the other way."

She turned it. The gates groaned shut, the water sank, and the barge settled into its cut as though it had only been waiting. In the morning the man was gone, and the hatch was dry. On the lock beam someone had scratched a pattern of circles inside circles, each one a little smaller than the last, and her father, when he came out to see, put his thumb on the centre and said nothing at all.