Black ornamental mandala tattoo with dotwork and bands of pattern covering the back of a hand and wrist, shown in a dark, moody photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala tattoo across the back of a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A dense ornamental design of concentric mandala-style motifs, scallops and dotted bands covers the back of the hand and wrist, with the fingers left bare. The work is built from fine black linework and solid dots, with fine detail in the scalloped borders. The image is entirely black and grey, shot in low light against a dark, mottled surface with the hand placed diagonally across the frame.

Blackwork Dotwork Hand Mandala Ornament Pattern Dot Scallop Geometric

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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 down, and mind the cable, it still hums where the old reactor was. You want the story of the Gate Pattern? Then you'll have to hear about Ysolde Marr, who could not sleep unless her hands were busy.

Keep reading

On the hauler Patience, nine hundred years out from Earth and most of them spent drifting, there was no ink left, so people wrote on skin with soot and needles. Ysolde had a wrist full of rings, circle inside circle, each one scalloped like the lip of a cup. Her mother had inked them, and her mother had been taught by a woman who never once saw a sky.

Every dot, Ysolde said, was a day the ship had spent in the dark without anyone dying. Count them and you counted mercy. The scallops were the hull plates, forty to a ring, and the lines between them were the seams the cold could find. She would tap the rings while she talked, one, two, three, and the children would tap along on their knees.

The year the coolant failed, the council begged her to read the dots for a route. She laughed at them. Then she laid her hand flat on the dark table and traced the scallops in the order her mother had taught her, not the order of the dots. A path opened through the lines like a thread pulled loose from a hem. Lamps came on in the far corridor where nobody had walked since the first winter.

They say she never told anyone which dot was the door. I think she did, and you have been looking at it all along, child. Find the place where the rings stop at the edge of the hand. That is where you press your own palm down to close it.