Black and grey ornamental mandala and floral tattoo with dotwork shading on a woman's forearm, shown beside her torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala forearm tattoo

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo runs along the forearm, with a central mandala-like motif of layered petals and paisley scrolls. A sprig of small flowers and curling swirls extends towards the elbow, and fine dots add stippled shading around the ornament. The photo shows the arm across a torso dressed in white underwear, with a navel piercing and a gold wristwatch in the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Mandala Paisley Flower Swirl Ornament Petal Dot

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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 yourself down, and mind the crisp packet. The Ashdown blocks stood on the hill above the canal, fourteen storeys of grey concrete with nothing on them but more grey, and the people inside had given up on colour the way you give up on a bus that never comes. Then a woman called Mirela Obi moved into flat 9C with a biscuit tin of fine pens and started drawing on the back of the estate notices.

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She drew a flower first, five petals, and pinned it to the lift doors. Then she drew another that was the first one turned inside out, then a fern curl unrolling, then a teardrop that folded back on itself like the paisley on her grandmother's shawl. Every week the caretaker scraped them off, and every week there were more, until the whole stairwell had a lace of dots and loops that looked like the works of a pocket watch.

Now the caretaker, Mr Tindall, was a man who counted everything. One wet morning he went to scrape the pattern off the bin store wall and found he could not make his hand do it. He stood there with the scraper until the rain ran down inside his collar, and then he climbed fourteen floors and knocked on 9C and asked her for a pen.

He drew one petal, badly. She laughed and told him that was how every good thing begins. Go on, then, the blocks are still standing, and the pattern is still there if you look up.