Black fine line mandala tattoo with a floral centre, placed on the centre of the chest between the breasts, shown on a bare torso with a navel piercing.

Mandala tattoo on the sternum

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala with a flower-like centre and pointed petal shapes is drawn in black ink on the centre of the chest. The linework is fine and even, with small dot and stipple details filling the petals and outer points. The photo is taken close up on a warm-toned torso, with a white waffle robe on one side and a wooden chest of drawers softly blurred in the background.

Fine line Geometric Chest Mandala Flower Lotus Ornament Pattern

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 brass stencils lived in a tobacco tin in the back room of my uncle's print shop on Chapel Row, and I was nine before he let me touch them. They had come up from Liverpool in a crate marked fragile, and he called them his mandalas, a word he had picked up from a sailor who had picked it up in Calcutta. Nobody in Hebden Lane knew what it meant, so nobody asked, and my uncle liked it that way.

Keep reading

The trouble started with a bolt of blue cotton for the Whit Friday dresses. The Ferriby sisters had ordered a lotus pattern for the church hall, and the tracing paper came back from the Leeds printers with the outer petals smudged to nothing. My uncle sat with his bad hand flat on the counter for a long time and then looked at me. I counted the petals on the stencil with a pin, eight in the first ring, sixteen in the second, and drew them out in Indian ink, working from the centre outwards, the way he showed me. Where a petal had gone soft I pricked the cloth with a needle and let the dots stand for shading, a little stipple at every point, until the whole thing looked like it had been breathed onto the paper.

On the last night I found one petal on the stencil left uncut, a small empty space at the top of the flower where the brass had never been filled. I sat with the lamp pulled close and understood he had left it for me to finish, and that he had known I would notice. I drew it in myself, very carefully, and blotted the ink.

On the Friday the sisters walked the dresses down the lane in the thin sunshine, and the blue lotus turned slowly on each skirt as they went past the chapel door.