Back view of a fine line black mandala tattoo with dotted accents centred on the upper back, with a hand holding the top of a grey vest.

Dotted mandala on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala with a central eye-like motif sits on the upper back, surrounded by a ring of petal and scallop shapes and small scattered dots. The linework is fine and dark, with the pattern built up through dotwork detail. The photograph shows the back of a person with blonde hair in a grey top, with a hand resting on the fabric at the lower edge of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Dot Ornament Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mum never drew anything straight. On the Saltbrush road she'd crouch beside the grader with a stick and a tin of chalk, and before I'd finished my coffee there'd be a circle in the dust, ringed with dots like stops on a bus route.

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The surveyors laughed at her. They had their theodolites and their tidy grid, and she had her petals, scalloped and fussy, with a small dark eye at the centre that she said was where the water hid. Nobody thought the eye meant anything until the spring the county sent a man called Hollis to measure the road for a new culvert. He stood over her circle for an hour, then unfolded a map from inside his shirt.

Every dot on her drawing was a well. Fourteen of them, scattered out past the cattle grids, some forgotten since her grandfather's day. She had drawn them from memory, sitting in the cab with a flask, and the eye in the middle was the one that still gave water when the others had gone to crust. Hollis wanted to know how she knew. Mum said she'd been counting them since she was small enough to be lifted onto the seat.

The rain came that August and washed the chalk off the verge. I drove past the place last month and found nothing but grit and a thin tyre track. I still keep the map, soft at the corners, and when I look at the dots I can see her hand moving slow and certain, round and round until it reached the middle.