White ink mandala tattoo with layered petals and a dotted centre, sitting on a forearm against a dark leather surface.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White ink mandala on forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A large mandala is tattooed in white ink on the forearm, with concentric rings of petal shapes radiating from a small central medallion. The linework is fine and even, and the white ink stands out as raised, pale lines against the reddened skin around it. The design fills the frame, centred on the arm with a dark leather background.

Geometric Forearm Mandala Flower Petal Medallion Pattern

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

The ink ran dry somewhere south of the Line, so Hollis mixed the last of the chalk white with gum and spirit and said it would have to do. By then half the watch had forearms burnt the colour of boiled ham, and the sun had been on us for six weeks without a cloud to spare.

Keep reading

He drew the pattern on my arm with a sail needle dipped in that paste. Rings of petals, one inside another, spread out from a centre no bigger than a shilling, copied from the compass rose the navigator had once sketched on the back of a spoiled chart. "Every line is a bearing," Hollis said. "Hold still and it'll take."

It took the way his lines always took, pale and raised, standing up off the red skin like frost on a porthole. In the evenings the men gathered by the lantern to see whose arm showed the cleanest rings, and we argued over which petals were truest. Nobody could make out the design at all unless the sun had been hard on it, and nobody on deck said so, because that would have meant admitting the thing only showed up when we had been scorched.

At Simon's Town the wind dropped and the red went out of us. Hollis looked at my arm on the quay and shrugged. The rings had gone to a faint seam, like the pencil marks on a chart after the rain has got at them. I found I could still trace every petal with my eyes shut, and I did, all the way up the gangway, counting the bearings home.