Woman seen from behind with long hair, showing a dark dotwork mandala tattoo on the middle of her back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark mandala tattoo on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with long hair, seen from behind, has one hand raised into her hair. A dark mandala design sits to the right of her spine on her mid back, built from radiating petal shapes, dotted shading and small leaf-like forms. The ink is black and the background is a soft-focus outdoor scene of trees.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Floral Leaves Pattern

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, you lot, the lamps on Corbel Street are lying again and I won't shout over the trams. This is the one about Tobiah Penhallow and the baker's yard behind Saltmarket, where the moths came down every night like sparks off a grinder.

Keep reading

The baker, Mrs Ada Quarrie, was losing a sack of flour a week to them. They got into the dough, into her hair, into the loaves cooling on the sill. She sent for every sign-painter in the district and every one said the same thing: moths don't read paint. So Tobiah, who was sixteen, had a steady hand and no sense, took a pot of lamp-black and a bent nib and drew a flower on the back wall, a round one, with petals that went out and out like the spokes of a cart wheel.

He did the leaves last, small curled things at the rim, and then he stippled the centre with dots, hundreds of them, one at a time, until his wrist ached and the bells of St Brannoc struck two. Ada came out in her nightdress with a candle and said it looked like a bruise that had learned manners.

That night the moths came down as usual and settled on the petals, every one on a dot, wings folded, and not one of them went near the bread. In the morning there were more dots on the wall than there had been the night before, though nobody had drawn them. Tobiah swore he'd counted. Ada said the moths had only come to see what he'd made, and what he'd made was a bed.