Close-up of a black ornamental mandala tattoo with lotus-like petals and dot details on the inner wrist and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala tattoo on a wrist

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a symmetrical ornamental design of a mandala with lotus-like petals, scrolls and dotted accents, spreading across the inner wrist. The lines are dark and fairly uniform, with fine detail in the centre and a solid, bold outline around the outer petals. The ink is a single dark tone, and the photo shows a person seated with light trousers in the background.

Forearm Mandala Lotus Floral pattern 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

Hannah Pell had been pricking the pattern through tracing paper for three nights before the mill whistle, pin by pin, so the dots would come through the cloth like frost. The design was a mandala. Her father called it a wheel, but the buyers in Calcutta had sent the drawing with a lotus at its heart and a scroll curling out from each petal like a fern unrolling.

Keep reading

She worked under the gas lamp at the far end of the cutting room, where the draughts crept in under the door and lifted the paper. Mr Asquith walked the floor at two each morning, and he always stopped at her table, tapped the sheet with his pipe stem and asked whether the thing was finished yet. It was never finished. The outer petals were the hard part: a solid, bold edge that had to hold its line through forty yards of indigo wool, while the centre opened into threads no thicker than a hair.

On the third night the paper tore along a fold. She taped it, then sat with the pricker in her hand and saw that the tear had made a second lotus, lopsided and small, in the corner where no one would look. She could have pricked over it. Instead she traced it in pencil and let it stand beside the first, two flowers that did not match, and she carried the sheet to the loading bay unsealed.

The shawl went out on the Tuesday train. Months later a parcel came back with a Calcutta stamp, a pressed flower inside and one line in the buyer's careful hand: the small one is the one we wear.