Colour geometric mandala tattoo with red, teal and grey petal rings on the outer upper arm near the elbow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Radial mandala on an upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A symmetrical radial mandala fills the outer upper arm near the elbow, built from layered petal-like rings. The linework is bold and dark, with grey and blue-grey shading that gives the rings depth and a pink centre. Red, teal and pink accents sit against the grey, and the design is shown on a bent arm with a maroon t-shirt sleeve and an indoor background.

Geometric Upper arm Mandala Radial pattern Petal Ring

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

Right, shift up, there's room on the bench. You want the Petal Gardens, or the one about the mirror-keeper? The Petal Gardens first, because they're the reason anybody still lived on Tessaly Ring when the sea went grey. Eleven rings of glass, one inside the other, turning slow as a clock hand that has forgotten what time is for. Each ring kept its own weather. The outer ones were blue at dawn and the inner ones were rose, and in the middle, where the air ran thin and cold, sat a pool no wider than a cartwheel that the old engineers called the eye.

Keep reading

A girl named Orla Venn was sent up from the lower decks with a tin of seed and a debt. Her father had prised a petal from the fourth ring to sell for scrap, the ring cracked, and the whole wheel sulked for a season, its ventilators wheezing out of tune. Orla's job was to walk the rings each night with a lamp and a brush, count the teal panels gone dark, and swap in spares from the locker. The spares were numbered in a language nobody spoke any more, so she learned it from the panels themselves, reading their red seams the way a child reads a ledger.

On the ninth night she reached the eye and found the pool was not water. It was a lid. Beneath it, grey on grey, a gear the size of a town turned very slowly, and every petal in the wheel was pinned to its teeth. She understood then why the rings kept their pattern however high the sea climbed. They were not decoration. They were the hands of something that had been counting us all along.

So she did the only sensible thing and eased the lid back a finger's width, so the light could get in. Then she went down to the lower decks, fetched her father, and told him to bring his scrap knife. On nights when the wind sits in the north you can still hear the wheel going round, and if you listen hard you'll hear it skip, just once, the way a person does when they've finally been seen.