Two views of a red and black mandala tattoo with dotwork shading on the inner elbow and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red mandala tattoo on an elbow

Dotwork · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo is a symmetrical mandala with layered red petals, a dark central circle and a ring of smaller petals. Black outlines and fine dotwork stippling give the petals depth, and the red ink fades slightly towards the edges. The left photo shows the design across the forearm, and the right shows it wrapped over the bent elbow.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Circle

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

Sit nearer, the fire's given up and the lamp is all we've got. You want the old Pardoe story, the one about the red ring? Right. Mind the wet on the step.

Keep reading

Tobias Wren had a brass compass and a tin of ochre the colour of a robin's chest, and in the autumn the Pardoe Brothers Travelling Show was down to nine horses and one patched tent, he drew a flower in the sawdust of the ring. Twelve petals first, then twelve more inside them, each one pricked out with a nail so the dust held the dots. Mrs Pardoe said it was foolishness. The ringmaster said it was the only thing in the county worth a ticket.

Every night they worked the act over that flower. The girl on the wire stepped only on the black circle in the centre, where the old tent pole's iron was sunk, and the folk in the gallery leaned over the rail and swore they saw a bloom opening under the lamps. The red faded toward the rim a little more each week, the way paint does when rain blows under the canvas, and nobody bothered to touch it up.

When the bank came for the big top, they struck the tent on a Tuesday. Tobias stood in the empty ring with the rain coming down and watched the petals run into the mud, pale at the edge and dark at the heart. The iron stayed where it was, sunk in the middle of it. That's the thing, you see. Whatever the circus was, the flower was the bit that stayed behind.