Close-up of dark ornamental tattoos on a thigh and knee, including a mandala-style design, in a blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental blackwork on thighs

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of bare legs showing large black tattoos on the thigh and knee, with a sunburst-like design and a floral motif near the knee. A hand rests on the leg, and fine chains with small pendants are draped across the skin. The ink is solid black with bold outlines and ornamental fill, and the image is composed tightly on the legs against a white garment at the top.

Blackwork Thigh Mandala Sun Ray Floral Ornament Chain

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 bronze is still ticking as it cools when Hermon puts the disc in your hands and tells you to count the rays. Forty-one, you say. He tells you to count again, and you do, and it is forty-one again, though the wax you pressed the mould from had twelve. Outside, the carts are grinding along the Canopic road and the harbour smell creeps in under the workshop door, but inside there is only the tap of your file and his slow breathing over your shoulder.

Keep reading

The disc is for a shrine near the Brucheion, a small square room where a widow named Thaïs wants her husband's sun kept above the lamp. She asked for fire-lines wide as a finger, a ring of lotus petals and a chain of silver beads hung from the lower rim, so that the light would catch whenever the door opened. You soldered the beads yourself, one by one, until your thumbs blistered and the chain sagged in the middle like wet washing.

Hermon takes the file from you at dusk and works the last ray himself, grinding it down until it is thinner than a eyelash. You expect him to finish the thing and send you home. Instead he drills a pinhole through the centre of the rosette, right where the petals meet, and tells you to hold the disc up to the window.

When you do, a single bright coin of light falls across the floor, and then it moves, slowly, as the sun goes over the city. You understand then why there are forty-one rays, and why there is one place in the room where the sun is allowed to land.