Black ink circular yantra design with radiating script across the middle of a bare back, with part of another tattoo visible at the lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circular yantra with script on mid-back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large circular design sits across the middle of the back, built from rings of small script-like characters and radiating spiked points, similar to a sak yant. The linework is solid black with uniform line weight and no shading, and the design is shown on bare skin against a plain, lightly lit background. A partial tattoo with bold dark shapes is visible at the bottom edge of the frame.

Back Circle Mandala Radiating lines

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

Sit closer, the gulls are loud tonight and I have only one good story left in me before the tide turns. You want to know about the monk's wheel. Everyone asks about the wheel. My brother Somchai had one inked on his shoulder blade the year the boats stopped coming to the old pier, and he swore the little letters around its rim were a prayer and a warning both, depending on which way you read them.

Keep reading

He went to the temple at Bang Nam Chuen before dawn, when the monks were still yawning over their rice. The old teacher sat him on a mat, drew the circle in red ink with a bamboo stick, and filled it with characters so small Somchai said his eyes watered trying to follow them. The teacher pressed the needle to him and chanted, and the chant went on so long the lamps burned down twice. Somchai never once cried out, not even when the spikes went in, because the teacher had told him that every point of the star was a door, and a man does not complain at a door he is trying to open.

What he did not tell anyone was that the teacher made him promise to read the wheel backwards every night before sleep, starting at the centre and spiralling out, the way you unwind a fishing line. Somchai kept that promise for thirty years. When the last boat finally came home in the monsoon of that year, it was Somchai who stood on the wall and counted the lamps aboard, one by one, and every one of them was lit. So you see, child, the wheel does not keep you from the sea. It only makes sure you come back to count the ones who did.