Back view of a woman with colourful traditional tattoos of a snake and flowers across her back and arms, and a black and grey dotwork mandala on her neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Back, arm and neck tattoos with snake and mandala

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

The photo shows a woman seen from behind with both arms raised and hands resting on her head, displaying tattoos across her upper arms, forearms, back and neck. A black and grey dotwork mandala with star details sits at the nape of the neck, while the back and arms feature bold colour work including a snake, pink and purple flowers and green leaves. Colour is concentrated on the back and arms, with a grey rose on the back of one hand, and the bright, softly blurred room behind her keeps the focus on the tattoos.

Traditional Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Forearm Hand Back Neck Woman Rose Mandala Snake Flower Leaves Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The shawl was still warm from the iron when Aunt Vesna pinned it over my shoulders and told me to stop fidgeting, because the vicar was already coughing in the side aisle. The lace was black, worked in rings of tiny dots she had counted out by lamplight for three winters, opening from a centre like a star chart. Nobody in the family could say where the pattern came from, only that her mother had carried the paper of it from Trieste in a biscuit tin.

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The snake was the argument. Gran had wanted a swan, Mum a dove, and Vesna had simply run a green thread along the hem and let it coil round the edge where nobody would look straight at it. "A snake keeps a house honest," she said, biting off the thread. Then she laughed and admitted the roses were the wrong pink, because the dye had run short and she would not wait a week for more. They were the colour of old sweets, and she said they suited a woman who had waited long enough.

At the door, my husband's uncle, who had spent forty years painting shop signs, bent close to read the hem and said, quite politely, that the snake was biting its own tail. Vesna looked at him for a long moment. "Only sign-painters ever count the loops," she said, and took the shawl back off my shoulders, folded it in four, and pressed it into my hands. "You'll need it when the weather turns."

It rained as we came out onto the steps. The black dots beaded with water and held it like the star chart it was, and I stood there with the shawl dripping on my wrists, understanding that she had never once meant it as decoration.