Large blue and navy ornamental tattoo of paisley shapes and mandala-style flowers spreading across a person's upper back and shoulder blade.

Blue paisley and mandala design across a back

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The tattoo covers much of the upper back and shoulder, built from paisley teardrops, scrolling curls and layered mandala-style flowers. Fine dark outlines and dotted detailing sit over solid blue and navy fills, with a few peach-toned petals adding contrast. The design flows diagonally from the lower left towards the top right, with the back of the head and hair visible at the top edge of the frame.

Back Paisley Mandala Flower Scroll Ornament Swirl

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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

Ada Renshaw had been stirring the indigo vat since five, and her forearms were blue to the elbow when the pedlar's bundle finally came off the carrier's cart. Hamid Qureshi had left it as surety against eleven shillings owed for thread, and he had not come back for it in the three weeks since. She unfolded the shawl across the drying frame and the whole room seemed to tilt towards it.

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Teardrops the shape of ripe mangoes ran in a slow tide from one corner to the other, each one curled at its tip like a young fern. Between them sat flowers built in rings, petal inside petal, outlined so finely that she had to hold the cloth to the window to be sure of the lines. Two petals on every bloom were the colour of a peach skin, and the rest a blue so deep it was nearly black where the folds lay.

Tom came in from the yard and said she would never copy it. She did not argue. She took a quill, a stub of chalk and the back of an unpaid invoice, and for a week she drew scrolls at the kitchen table after the children were asleep, until her wrist ached and the candle guttered down to a stub.

On the Sunday before the Michaelmas fair, Hamid appeared at the gate with his hat in his hands. She showed him the stencil she had cut from card, the flower turned three times round, the paisley tipped the right way. He studied it for a long time, then the shawl, then laughed softly and said his grandmother had drawn the same curl on her doorstep with a burnt stick. "Keep the cloth," he said. "Just tell me which flower is yours."