Back of a hand with black mandala-style tattoos over the knuckles and fingers, resting on a bare thigh on a sandy beach.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoos on the hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a bikini-clad torso and hands on a beach, showing the back of one hand and fingers covered in black ornamental tattoos. The largest design is a rounded mandala-like motif with radiating petals and a dotted centre, with smaller stippled patterns on the fingers. The ink is black and grey against warm skin, and the background of sand, sea and sky is softly out of focus.

Blackwork Dotwork Hand Mandala Ornament Dot Hand Beach

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 canvas is already down when you reach the field at Ashby, so you walk its length on your knees with a palm full of pins, feeling for the tears the rain has found. Mr Falconer wants the centre roundel mended before the last Saturday, the one they painted the year the elephant still had a name. You know the design by touch before you see it: sixteen petals of faded red, a ring of blue, then the small black dot at the middle where the poles were lashed.

Keep reading

Nobody buys tickets for the big top any more. The council wants the ground for houses, the lion man has gone to sell dentures in Lincoln, and the twins who flew the trapeze now stack tins on the market stall. Still you sit under the sagging crown with a bent needle and a spool of waxed thread, working inward from the edge the way your mother taught you with lace, one petal at a time, so the whole sun does not fall into the sawdust.

Near dusk Falconer comes in with two mugs of stewed tea and stands looking up at the patch. He says it will hold for a season, maybe two. You say you know. He asks whether you will stay with the show or take the van south, and you tell him you have only ever wanted to know which bit of canvas to mend next. He laughs, the first time in weeks.

When the light goes you stay on, the lamp hung from a pole, and you finish the last stitch around the black dot in a tight spiral until there is no fabric left to gather. Pressing your thumb to the knot, you feel the whole roundel pull taut overhead, and for once nothing in the tent sags.