Black and grey mandala tattoo with dotwork petals and small seed pod motifs across the forearm.

Mandala tattoo on the forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala of layered petals, scrolls and a starburst centre sits across the forearm, with small seed pods placed around the outer edge. The design combines fine outlines, stippled dotwork borders and soft grey shading to give depth to the petals. The ink is entirely black and grey against a plain pale skin tone and dark background.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Seed pod Scroll Starburst Dot

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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

Now sit down, you lot, and mind the draught from that door. I'll tell you about the Lantern Ballroom at Hollin Pier, the year a plasterer came up from Grimsby with a bag of tools and a grudge against straight lines.

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He was hired to mend the ceiling after the big storm, but he took it upon himself to make a rosette forty feet across, with petals layered like the inside of a cabbage and a starburst at its heart. Folk said he worked by a single candle because he'd lost the sight in one eye and trusted only the other. Every morning the dancers below saw a little more of it, and nobody noticed the seed pods creeping round the rim until old Nell Ashdown pointed them out.

Nell kept the dance card and would not let anyone waltz without answering to her first. She counted the steps aloud, slow as a clock, and she swore the pods were the only honest things in the room. On the last night before the hall shut for the war, she climbed the ladder with a lamp and found his name scratched small in the middle of the starburst, with a date and one word beneath it: Finished.

The band stopped mid-tune that night, though nobody had signalled them. We all looked up, and the lamplight caught the starburst just so, and for a moment the whole ceiling seemed to turn slowly, the way a great flower turns to the sun. Nell put her card in her apron pocket and said nothing at all, which in that hall was the highest praise going.