Back view of a woman with a black blackwork ornamental tattoo of stacked leaves and a mandala motif running from the nape of the neck down the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black ornamental tattoo across upper back and neck

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a symmetrical ornamental design of a central mandala-like motif with teardrop and leaf shapes descending down the upper back, with a fan-like crest at the nape of the neck. The linework is dense and detailed, with several leaf forms filled in solid black and finer patterned detail within the motifs. The design is rendered entirely in black ink on a smooth, pale background, with the figure shown from behind in a white bandeau top.

Blackwork Back Neck Mandala Leaf Feather Ornament Teardrop Paisley

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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 lift was out again, so Mrs Adeyemi's shawl came up forty-one flights in a carrier bag, folded into a square the size of a hymn book. She had asked me to mend the border and nothing else. I had already spent three evenings under the lamp with a magnifier and a pot of fine black ink, trying to work out where the teardrops stopped and the leaves began.

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The pattern was built like a cupped hand. At the top sat a round mandala, all spokes and tiny rings, and from it hung pairs of feathers that narrowed into paisley drops, each one fatter and darker than the last. Every leaf was filled solid except one near the bottom corner, which had been left open and stitched with a fine running pattern, like lace seen through rain. I told myself it was wear. Mrs Adeyemi said her mother had put it there on purpose, because a perfect border invites the evil eye, and a mistake keeps it busy.

I nearly believed her by the third night. When I finally traced the open leaf under the glass, the running pattern was not decoration at all. It was a line of tiny letters, two words, worked so small they looked like thread. They were a name and a village, and the name was her mother's, sewn in by a woman who had left in a hurry and never come back for the shawl.

I did not mend it. I cleaned the border, lifted the dust out of the mandala with a soft brush, and left the open leaf exactly as it was. The next morning I walked her shawl down to the balcony and hung it over the rail so she could see it from the window. Below us the wind moved the fringe over the car park, and for a minute the whole thing looked like it was breathing.