Blue and teal mandala tattoo with a yellow centre and black linework, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue mandala on upper back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A large, radially symmetrical mandala tattoo sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade. Layers of petal and scallop shapes are outlined in black, with fine dotted and hatched detail within each ring. Bright royal blue, mint green and a small yellow centre dominate the colour, with grey-toned shading in some of the inner petals.

Geometric Back Mandala Flower Petal Medallion

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the draught from that door, it has never shut properly since the winter of the big snow. Right. You'll want the tale of Ada Pallister and the blue window, because that's what the snow has brought us to tonight.

Keep reading

Ada was a glazier's girl in Keld, and her father had a dozen cracked panes he'd never got round to mending. She taught herself to cut glass the way other girls learned to sew, with a hot iron ring and a steady wrist. The vicar wanted a window for the chapel that would give the mourners some colour when the dark came in at four o'clock. Ada drew it on slate first: a round thing, petals inside petals, scalloped like frost on a jam jar, with a single gold eye in the middle where the light would land.

She had blue enough, the deep blue of the Hull ships' lamps, and mint green from a bottle a pedlar sold her for a shilling, but every gold she tried went to muddy brown in the kiln. On the last night before the frost set in, she sat up with the fire low and a coin of old Dutch glass her grandmother had hidden in a tea caddy. She dropped it in the melt and held her breath.

The window went up at Candlemas. When the sun cleared the moor, the chapel floor filled with rings of blue, and at the centre sat a small bright coin of light, warm as a yolk. Folk say the vicar wept. Folk also say Ada never cut glass again. That's nonsense, of course, because I have a piece of her work over my own hearth, and it is the ugliest thing you've ever seen.