Black mandala tattoo with scrolls and pointed petals curving across the side of the ribs on a bare torso, in black and grey.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on the side ribs

Blackwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black mandala design wraps in a curve across the side of the ribs, built from scalloped arcs, spiral scrolls and pointed petal shapes. The lines are solid and even, with larger areas filled in black for contrast against the pale skin. The photograph is black and white, showing the bare midriff and navel with the tattoo placed to the left of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Ribs Mandala Scroll Petal Spiral Geometric pattern Torso

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 welding crew had stopped asking Odile why she drew on the dock floor. Every shift she knelt by the spin-lock with a grease pencil and sketched circles inside circles, scalloped edges, spirals that curled back on themselves like fern heads. Nobody on Nettle Ring drew curves. The plans were all straight lines and right angles, printed by the hundred in an office on Wexford Ring three generations back, and the walls agreed with them.

Keep reading

Her grandmother had taught her the pattern on the back of a ration card, a half-wheel of petals that opened toward the light. Odile had never seen it on anything but paper. When the lamp in the aft corridor failed and the maintenance crew ran a diagnostic, she found herself tracing the shape across a ventilation grille with one finger, following the swirls where the air came through in soft sighs.

Ferris, the foreman, found her there with a torch and a frown. 'You're meant to be on the seam,' he said. She showed him the grille. The holes sat in arcs that matched her drawing exactly, and the spirals ran straight along the old pressure lines that had cracked twice in the last decade and been patched without anyone asking why. Someone long dead had laid the vents out in her grandmother's pattern, and the pattern had been holding the ring together all along.

Ferris stood a long while, then took the grease pencil from her and drew one more petal in the dust, pointed and deliberate. 'Weld that one in,' he said. Odile did. By the end of the month the arc was steel, curving along the aft ring where the window light fell, and nobody asked her what it meant again.