Black and grey mandala tattoo with dotwork shading on the side of the ribs, with a person lying on grey bed linen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on the side ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A person lies on their side in grey bedding, wearing black underwear with a white Calvin Klein waistband. A large black and grey mandala with a round central flower and layered petals sits on the side of the ribs. Fine dots and stippled shading give the petals depth, and a few small dots sit near the lower edge of the design.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Mandala Flower Dot Petal

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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

Sit closer, you with the wet boots, and keep your hands off the cat. Nobody in Hallowmere ever finished a rug that came out right, not in my grandmother's time nor hers, because they all started at the edge and worked inward like sensible people. Old Ysolde Marrow did it the other way round. She started with the middle, a single flower no bigger than a barley grain, and she pressed it into the grey wool with a bone needle and said nothing to anybody.

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Her husband thought she had gone soft in the head, and the lamplighters agreed with him. But every morning she added one ring of petals, each one slower than the last, and between the petals she set small dots of dark thread. She counted them under her breath, one for every drop that had fallen from the eaves that winter, because she said a floor should remember the weather that made it.

When the coverlet was done, the whole kingdom climbed the hill to see it. The king came in his grey cloak with the gold clasp, the bakers came with flour on their sleeves, and the children came with sticky thumbs they were told to keep behind their backs. They formed a ring around the cloth, and the old woman sat down in the very centre, where the first flower was.

Nobody could tell, from where they stood, whether she was the seed of the thing or its last petal. The king asked her which. She only laughed, pulled the needle from her hair, and began a new ring at the edge.