Pencil drawing of a symmetrical geometric mandala design with petal shapes, swirls and dots, shown on a sketchbook page.

Symmetrical mandala flash design

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A four-way symmetrical ornament drawn in pencil on paper, with a central star-like flower of layered petals surrounded by arrow-like points, scrolls and small dots. The linework is fine and detailed, with hatching and dotted fills inside the petals and soft grey shading around the centre. The design is shown straight on, filling the centre of a plain sketchbook page with a spiral binding along the left edge.

Geometric Mandala Snowflake Flower Petal Swirl Dot Arrow Ornament

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

Ada had kept the sketchbook under the bench since October, where the damp couldn't reach it, and every evening she drew one more point onto the same star. The barge Mabel Rook sat frozen at the end of the Sallow Cut with ice at her bow like a lid. Her father's hands had gone too stiff for the tiller, so she kept the lamps trimmed and the stove fed and drew when the work was done.

Keep reading

Her father had a rule: draw what you can see from the cabin window. Outside, the lock gate was white, the reeds were white, and every breath she let out hung in the air and fell. She tried to copy the frost on the glass, the way it grew from the corners in arms that split and split again, but it never sat still long enough to be copied. So she drew it from memory instead, four arms, each with its arrow and its curl, and set a dot wherever a drop had frozen mid-fall.

On the ninth night the lock keeper, Mr Dunnage, knocked with a flask of tea and found her with the pencil hovering over the centre. "That's a thaw wheel," he said, and she didn't ask what he meant. He told her the old bargemen cut a star like that into the lids of their chests so the river would always know which way home was. She looked at her drawing and noticed that every arrow pointed outward, and that the centre, where the petals opened, was the only part without a point.

In the morning the ice had gone grey at its edges. Ada shaded the petals dark, left the middle white, and closed the book. Then she went up on deck to see which way the water was running.