Black ink ornamental mandala tattoo with dangling chains and a feather on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate black ink mandala on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental design of arched, lace-like panels with concentric circles and dotted edges, with strings of beads hanging below and a feather at the bottom. The linework is solid black with fine detail in the scrollwork, and no shading or colour is used. The design is centred on the side of the torso, with a dark top and a hand with patterned nails visible at the edges of the frame.

Ribs Mandala Feather Bead Chain Circle Ornament Lace pattern

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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 closer, you lot, the wind's got into the candy floss and it'll blow your hats off if you stand in the gap. Now. You want the one about Mother Ansel's lace? Nobody wants the one about the lace, they want the one about the fire-eater, but the fire-eater's been paid and I've been paid less, so the lace it is.

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Ansel ran the last booth on the Dunmere ground before the war, a striped tent with a canvas door that never shut properly. She kept a cabinet of bone combs and bottled rain, and across the front of her caravan she hung her mother's curtain, panels of black thread worked so fine you could see the hedge through them. Every panel was an arch, every arch had its rings of eyes, and from the bottom hung strings of jet beads that clicked when the wagon moved, with a single grey feather on a silver link to tell the wind which way to go.

One spring the curtain went missing. A boy from the rides swore he saw a crow carry it off over the chimney stacks, and Ansel swore she'd have that crow's feathers for her collar, and she did, and that's another story. But the curtain was gone, the booth went dark, and folk began to say the fair had lost its luck.

Here's the turn. Years on, a woman walked up the lane with the curtain folded over her arm, dry as paper, and asked for Ansel. Ansel was long dead and her caravan sold for scrap. The woman laid the lace on the grass, lifted one bead between two fingers and said, tell her it was never stolen, only lent. Then she walked off towards the river and didn't come back.

I've hung it on my own wagon since. It clicks when I cross the field, and the feather still points where the wind wants to go. Now, the fire-eater. Off you go and tip your pennies in the hat.