Black and grey mandala tattoo on a shoulder, with bold blackwork petals and fine line rings radiating from a central circle.

Mandala tattoo on the shoulder

Blackwork · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular mandala covers the upper arm and shoulder, built from layered petals, scalloped rings and a central medallion. Solid black fills alternate with fine outlines and small dot details, with soft grey shading on some petals. The design is centred on the shoulder, and the woman's black top and bra strap sit at the edge of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Shoulder Mandala Flower Ornament Circle Petal

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 lace came through Dover in a biscuit tin, wrapped in tissue, and the woman carrying it had already told me twice that it was for her grandmother's funeral and not for sale. I unfolded the tissue on the steel counter under the strip light. It was a round piece the size of a dinner plate, worked in white thread so fine it looked like frost on a window. Scalloped outer edges, then a ring of stiff little bars, then petals folding inward like a flower closing for the night, and in the centre a single bead-bright eye.

Keep reading

I should have logged it and let her go. Instead I counted. Forty-eight petals on the outer ring, twenty-four on the next, twelve on the third, and each set turned a fraction against the one below so that nothing lined up twice. My supervisor, Mr Okafor, would have called that a pattern, and a pattern was a kind of declaration. I asked her who had made it. She said her mother had worked it from a paper folding a man had shown her in a village she could no longer name, and the trick was that you never cut the centre first.

I took a pencil and traced it onto my clipboard, which I was not supposed to do, following the petals outward until the lead met the edge of the sheet. Then I started again from the middle. The eye was the only part sewn in a darker thread, so the lace could be read from either side. I realised she had not been smuggling anything. She was carrying a map of how to begin at the heart of a thing and work outward, and the form only asked me whether she had anything to declare.

I wrote None on the form, folded the tissue back over the lace, and handed her the tin.