Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with floral and paisley motifs wrapping around a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala sleeve on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is covered in an ornamental tattoo of stacked mandala-style medallions, with flower petals, leaves and paisley-like shapes. The design is built from fine stippled dots and clean outlines, with dense patterning and some solid black areas for contrast. The ink is entirely black and grey against pale skin, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against a white textured wall.

Dotwork Blackwork Forearm Mandala Flower Leaves Paisley Ornament Dot

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 shawl came up from London in a tea chest, folded so tightly that the paisleys had worn pale at the creases. Mr Pelham set it on my drawing board on a Monday and told me to copy it onto card for the Jacquard loom by Friday, and I think he gave it to me because nobody else in the office had steady enough hands for the work.

Keep reading

I worked under the green-shaded lamp from eight until my eyes ached, pricking each dot through the card with a needle no thicker than a hair. The loom only read what was punched, so every stipple of the ground had to be there, one fingernail's width from the next. A single medallion took three days. Petal after petal rose out of the paper, then the leaves, then the dark teardrop shapes that the old weavers had grown tired of and the mill had never stopped loving.

On the Thursday I found the fault. The central medallion sat a thread to the left of its own axis, so the whole upper half leaned like a man who has had one drink too many. I could have corrected it on the card in a minute. Instead I sat for a long time with the needle in my hand, thinking of whoever had owned the shawl, folding it each night in a flat with a view of the gasworks, and I left the lean where it was.

On Friday I took the cards down to the looms. Ada Crane fed the first one through and grinned at me over the clatter. The cloth came off the far roller the colour of wet slate, and when I stood close I could see my one crooked dot near the heart of the flower, a small honest error, the only thing in the whole length of it that had come from a person and not a machine.