Geometric and Mandala Tattoos - Atlanta GA
Mandala and geometric work is the most exacting thing I do. Everything gets measured and drawn to the body — a mandala on a shoulder has to be laid out to the curve of that shoulder, not drawn flat and applied to it. And there's nowhere to hide a wobble in a piece built out of repetition, so the lines have to be right the first time.
It's also where I've grown the fastest. The precision is a completely different discipline from florals or Japanese, and it's the work I'm hardest on myself about.
Mandalas: Ornamental, symmetrical, usually built around a single center point. Knees, elbows, shoulders, chest, spine, backs of hands — placements where the body already has a center to build from.
Geometric: Linework, sacred geometry, dotwork fields, pieces that use negative space as much as line. Often the frame or the ground that a mandala sits inside.
The two overlap constantly, and most of what I make sits somewhere between them.
What an ornamental project usually looks like
$250/hr, $100 minimum. A full day is six hours of tattooing. Unlike a Japanese full sleeve which takes 5-8 sessions, a mandala or a geometric sleeve could be up to double of that time: so, roughly 8-15 sessions.
This is a range, not a quote - the complexity of the design changes a lot. Send the idea and where you're thinking and I'll estimate properly.
Sacred Geometry & Norse Full Sleeve Tattoo
This geometry sleeve was completed in 2025 and took about 60-80 hours of work. The sleeve features hexagonal mandalas tessellating down from the shoulder, an asanoha star lattice filling the ground, negative-space bands cutting diagonally across the arm, a Metatron's cube set into ornamental lotus forms on the inner forearm, and Norse symbols — vegvísir, valknut and bind runes — below the elbow.
Mandala Sleeve
(3 years healed)
I completed this sleeve for a client over a series of sessions between late 2020 and early 2021. The whole piece took about 45 hours to complete, give or take. The sleeve includes custom mandala design, as well as working around previous tattoos and working them into the design.
This was one of a more challenging pieces of work, as it is highly detailed, with a lot of small design patterns. At the same time, I wanted to make sure that the tattoo is going to last well, therefore despite a lot of small details, I had to make sure to maintain good line thickness .
The sleeve was done at Bold City Tattoo in Jacksonville FL, and I only took a few cellphone photos originally. Later, after I had already moved to Atlanta, I returned to Jacksonville to guest-spot for several days, and met up with the customer to take photos of now 2.5-3 years healed sleeve. The light was really poor, and the client had a recent still healing elbow injury (visible on several photos), but it was still great to take the photos of this completed and now several years healed mandala tattoo sleeve.
Geometry sleeve
This geometry sleeve was worked on between May 2022 and May 2023 based on client’s availability. In total, it took about 60 hours of work. The sleeve features geometry patterns, mandalas, stipple shading.
Ornamental Tattoos Frequently Asked Questions
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To be honest, this is what makes this style challenging. There are several techniques that I use, including drawing and printing the stencil with the curves in mind, as well as trying multiple stencil options. I apply stencil on a standing body in a neutral pose as the default position.
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Yes! But line weight decides it. Heavy, well-spaced linework holds for decades; very fine lines packed very close together will soften and can run together over time. I design for how it'll look in ten years, which occasionally means I'll push back on the tightest version of an idea. Better to have that conversation before we start.
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Often, yes - a lot of my favorite pieces mix several styles. If your idea sits between two styles, that's normal. Send it over and we'll work out what it wants to be.
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Depends what we're doing. An outline needs about four weeks to heal before I shade over it. Once we're past that, if we're working different areas of skin we can go as often as once a week.