Black ink Thai script mandala tattoo arranged in a sunburst circle across the upper back, with a second tattoo partly visible at the lower back.

Circular Thai script mandala on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a circular design sits centrally on the upper back. It is made of small Thai script characters and symbols arranged in a ring with radiating pointed rays and tiered shapes around the outside. The linework is fine and even, with solid black ink and no colour, and the design is centred against bare skin with a soft light background.

Back Mandala Circle Sunburst Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anan had been grinding soot and resin since before the rain season, and still the ink would not sit right on the bamboo needle. "Too thin," he said, holding the bowl up to the window of the cell, where the light came through the mango trees in pieces. Novice Nong watched the ink run back off the tip and wanted to ask why it mattered, since the design on the palm leaf was already perfect.

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The old master had taught them that letters were not drawn but counted. Each character of the ring had to sit the same distance from the next, the rays set like spokes of a cart wheel, the outer tiers stacked so that a man could read them while turning. Nong had drawn the circle forty times and forty times the spacing drifted by a finger's width by the last symbol. Anan laughed and said a circle always closes itself if you let it, and that the mistake was in wanting to finish.

On the last morning of the dry season a fisherman's daughter came up the temple steps with a cloth bundle and a question she did not say aloud. Anan did not ask what she wanted protecting. She knelt on the mat, he dipped the needle, and he began at the top of the ring, where the first character sat like a small seated Buddha. Nong held the lamp and counted under his breath, one, two, three, the way they had been taught, until the count and the hand moved together.

When the sun came over the wall the circle was closed. Anan wiped the needle and said nothing, but he tapped the last ray twice with his thumb, as he always did, and Nong understood that the spacing had been right all along.