Red dotwork geometric flower tattoo with stippled petals and three circles, placed on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red geometric flower on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large geometric flower sits across the forearm, built from radiating pointed petals with a central starburst. The petals are filled with fine stippled dots, while the inner rays and circular shapes are outlined in solid line and left as unshaded skin. The tattoo is done entirely in a single shade of red ink against a dark background.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Flower Mandala Petal Circle Starburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house at Ketterby Cove had nine rooms, a brass bell over the scullery door, and a rule Mrs Ruth Pellow gave every lodger with their porridge. Never open the red door after the bell has rung. The door led to the back stair, and at the top of the stair, in the room without a window, a sea captain's widow had once painted a starburst on the plaster in madder root, pricking every petal with a darning needle so the colour would sink into the lime.

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Ruth's grandmother said the flower was a chart of the sky over the harbour. The rays were sightlines to the lighthouse and the round stones were the moons that dragged the tide up the slip. Ruth thought it was a tale to keep children off the stairs, until the October gales, when a quiet man called Tobias Greave took the room under the eaves, paid a month in advance and asked for the key on the first night.

The bell rang at two in the morning. Ruth climbed with a candle and found him standing beneath the starburst, his palm flat on the wall, counting under his breath. Every petal, he said, was a boat that had not come home, and he had lost count at thirty-eight. She knew the number. Forty-one names were written in the back of the register in her grandmother's hand, each one ticked off with a small red dot, and she had never once thought to add up the ticks.

She fetched the register, sat on the top step and read the names aloud until the candle guttered. At the last one, Tobias laughed, the way men do when a debt is paid, and went down to breakfast with his collar turned up. In the morning the red door stood open, the room was empty, and on the plaster a fresh petal had been pricked beside the rest, bright as a cut lip, with a name beside it that was not his.