Traditional style mandala tattoo in red, grey and black with bold outlines, on the forearm near the elbow.

Red and black mandala on forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large mandala-style flower tattoo with pointed petals in black, red and grey sits on the forearm near the elbow, with a central disc of grey and red. The bold black outlines and solid fills give it a traditional look, with soft grey shading on the petal tips. The arm is photographed at an angle against a white shirt, with a studio interior blurred in the background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dahlia had gone over in the night. Ilse Marrow found it at first light, the outer ring of petals bruised dark, the red inner rows still holding their points like a lamp turned low. In the kingdom of Orrel, where the crown had decreed one bloom per household and punished the rest, a dying flower was a debt someone would have to pay.

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She cut it anyway, because the decree said nothing about cutting. The stem was thick as a finger and bled a milky sap that stained her cuffs. Beneath the petals sat the central disc, grey-ringed and dense as a coin, and she turned it in the grey light until she found the seam where the seed-plate lifted free. Her father had shown her that seam forty years ago, in the hothouse behind the palace wall, when the glass was still whole.

Her brother Tomas came up the path at a run, shouting that the tax-clerk had arrived early. He stopped when he saw her hands. "You've taken the heart out."

"I've taken the heart out," she said, "so it can be planted somewhere the clerk doesn't count." She pressed the disc into the wet soil of the wall-bed, petals facing the sun, and for a moment nothing happened. Then the clerk's bell rang at the gate, the seam in the soil split like a sleeve, and a single pointed petal, black as ink and edged in red, pushed up through the earth to meet the light.

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