Black and grey ornamental mandala tattoo with a dotwork rosette and scrollwork on an upper arm, photographed beside an ornate iron gate.

Ornamental mandala on upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo covers the outer upper arm, with a dotted rosette at its centre surrounded by interlocking scrolls and lace-like panels. The linework is clean and fine, with solid black fills and stippled dots creating contrast. The design wraps partly around the arm and is shown against a blurred background of a wrought iron gate.

Blackwork Dotwork Upper arm Mandala Rosette Scrollwork Ornament Dot Lace pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gate had been promised to Mrs Ashdown for Lady Day, and by the second week of March Tobias Wren still had not finished the rosette. He had drawn it forty times on the backs of invoices, and each time the petals closed into the wrong shape, like a hand making a fist. Tamsin, who swept the forge floor and was not supposed to touch the tongs, watched him rub out another ring with the heel of his hand.

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"Go up the Hollin path," he said at last, "and bring me back what the brambles are doing." She went with a lantern and a folded sheet of paper, past the last cottage where the forest began, and found the ground under the old oaks lace-cut with frost. Every bramble curl had a dark dot at its heart where a dead berry had shrivelled, and the frost had ringed each one into a small sun. She traced them until her fingers ached and the lantern guttered.

When she came back he had already laid out the scroll panels on the anvil, each one a wave that broke into little hooks. He read her paper without speaking, then took up the punch and drove a dot into the centre of the rosette, one blow for each berry she had counted. The iron rang differently after that, sweet and low, and the metal held its shape without him having to coax it.

The gate went up at Ashdown Hall in April. Mrs Ashdown came out to admire it and stood a long time with her hand on a bar, looking through the lace into the trees beyond. Nobody in Hollin Cross ever saw her step through it, and the frost, they said, never came off the centre, not even in June.