Two black and grey mandala tattoos on a person's forearms, one with a crescent moon and one with a sun, set against a stone wall.

Matching mandala forearm tattoos with moon and sun

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms show large mandala tattoos with radiating petal and lace-like patterns. The left mandala frames a crescent moon over a circular medallion, and the right frames a sun at its centre, with fine linework and stippled dot shading. The tattoos are shown in black and grey ink against a sandstone background, with a small bird tattoo partly visible on the left wrist.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Crescent moon Sun Petal Bird Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The circle must close before the lamp is lit, Brother Osric says, and you have only reached the third petal of the sun. Your pen nib clots on the parchment and you blow on it the way the old scribes did, though it never helps. Beyond the scriptorium window the abbey wall has gone the colour of honey, and a pair of swallows dips over the orchard as if they had been given the evening to spend however they liked.

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The commission is for the infirmary guest house, two lintels facing each other across a courtyard. Abbess Helewise wants a moon on one and a sun on the other, each ringed in petals and lace, so that the sisters who pass between them feel they are walking through a door that opens both ways. You are to draw the moon first, because the moon is harder. Its crescent must be made of nothing but dots, stippled so lightly that it looks like rain on a pane of glass, and the ring behind it must be cut with the finest line you own.

You work past the bell for compline. The crescent keeps sliding off its centre and you cannot tell whether the fault is in your hand or in the moon. Near midnight Prior Anselm comes in with a candle, looks over your shoulder and says nothing for a long time. Then he tells you that the brothers at the far house make their mandalas in coloured sand and sweep them into the river the morning they are finished, because a picture that will last is a picture that has stopped being true. He leaves the candle. You sit with the lamp hissing and begin the sun again, dot by dot, knowing the lintels will weather in a decade. In the margin beside your work, a swallow you drew as a novice is still lifting off the page.