Colour chrysanthemum tattoo on the shoulder joining a red fine line mandala with a central Om symbol across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Chrysanthemum and red mandala on upper back

Japanese · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A pink and orange chrysanthemum with green leaves and small dark dots covers the left shoulder, with the petals shaded in soft gradients. Across the upper back, a circular mandala of peony-like flowers, scrolls and leaves is drawn in red fine line with an Om symbol at its centre. The composition flows from the coloured flower on the shoulder into the single-tone red linework, which is set against a plain skin background.

Japanese Fine line Shoulder Back Chrysanthemum Peony Leaf Mandala Om symbol Scroll Dot

Find an artist for this

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 dance hall at Lower Marrow had a floor that rang like a bell when the boots came down, and the old men said it had been laid over a spring so the water could hear the music. Every harvest the fiddlers came up from the coast and played until the lamps guttered.

Keep reading

Sefa Orrin swept that floor for her uncle. She owned one grey wool dress and a clay pot of chrysanthemums on the sill of the back room, orange at the heart and pink at the edges. Nobody asked her to dance, so she swept between the sets and counted the steps under her breath, the way her mother had taught her to count stitches.

On the last night a stranger came in with the rain, a man in a coat too thin for October. He did not dance. He asked for the broom, then knelt and drew on the boards with red chalk: a ring of peony heads and curling leaves, and at its centre the small curled sign the temple women painted on their doors. When the fiddles stopped he pressed his palm flat to the centre of it. The chalk did not smudge. He looked at Sefa's pot of flowers through the open door and said that a ring holds still only when something in the middle is willing to turn.

She laughed at him. By morning the chalk was gone, scrubbed away by her uncle, but the spring beneath the boards had risen in the night, and the floor was warm in one circle the size of a cartwheel. Sefa stood on it in her wool dress and felt the music come up through her heels.