Geometric

On YokoFolio, pick the style Geometric and then your city, and widen the radius if you need to. This style forgives nothing: check whether the circles stay round once they're on an arm, whether the symmetries are true, whether the patterns keep the same spacing end to end. A good artist also shows stencils fitted on skin before the session — that's the sign they compose on the real volume and not on a flat sheet. In healed photos, the lines should still be crisp and even, and close parallel lines shouldn't have merged. Ask the artist whether they draw the design for your own arm or adapt a ready-made pattern, and plan to have the stencil put on and move around in front of a mirror before you sign off.

The mandala remains the classic, because it adapts to almost any area. Then come animals built out of facets — wolf, lion, owl, deer — where the geometry draws the volume, and sacred-geometry figures made of interlocking circles and polygons. Abstract compositions of circles, triangles and patterns work very well as a band or across a shoulder. Simple works too: a few lines, a triangle, an open circle, a constellation. The logic is the same — regularity is everything — but there's less material to absorb an imprecision, so placement matters even more: a straight line on a forearm has to look straight with the arm at rest, which often means offsetting it slightly. Choose for the area as much as for the subject: a round shape needs a wide, fairly flat surface to stay true.

It's one of its best uses: patterns can run from shoulder to wrist and wrap the whole limb. Two places decide whether it works, and those are what to look at in a portfolio — the shoulder, which is a ball, and the elbow, which bends. A pattern that crosses both without warping is the proof of skill. The forearm also narrows toward the wrist, so a repeating motif has to shrink as it goes without losing its rhythm. A good geometric sleeve usually alternates zones — open linework, solid black, dot shading — so the eye has places to rest; plan the whole layout at the start rather than adding pieces one at a time. Budget a whole appointment for the linework alone, before any fill.

Dotwork is a way of shading: tone made of visible dots, dense in the shadows and sparse in the light. Geometric is a matter of structure — circles, polygons, symmetry, patterns — drawn in clean lines, flat black or dots. When the geometry itself is shaded or built in dots, the piece carries both styles; a few dots added as accents to a line design don't make it Dotwork. Ornamental adorns the body with decorative motifs — lace, filigree scrolls, beads and pendants, petal rosettes — placed like jewelry along a collarbone, a spine or a hip. Geometric stays strict: figures you could draw with compass and ruler, with no lace or filigree. A mandala can fall either way, and often carries both. If the design is built from strict figures — circles, polygons, straight divisions — it's Geometric.