I’ve Spent Years Perfecting Ornamental Tattoos, And Here Are 30 Of My Favorite Pieces

Long before ornament became a tattoo style, it was a visual language shared across the world. Sacred geometry has appeared in art and architecture across cultures for millennia (Islamic tessellations, Celtic knotwork, Vedic yantras), while mandalas trace back to Hinduism and Buddhism, where mandalas were used as spiritual symbols representing the universe. On the skin, pattern runs just as deep. The English word “tattoo” comes from the Polynesian word tatau, which Captain James Cook brought back to England after his 1771 voyage, and in Tonga, warriors were inked with geometric patterns, triangles, bands, areas of solid black, from the waist to the knees.

The modern ornamental style took shape much more recently. In the 1990s, London artist Xed Le Head, known as the “Dotfather”, helped turn dotwork into a style of its own, building shading one tiny dot at a time. Geometric tattooing followed: as a modern tattoo style, it emerged prominently in the 2010s, when the rise of Instagram gave geometric tattooers a global platform. Today’s ornamental work borrows from all of these traditions at once, from ancient temple walls to the tattoo studios of London.