Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with radiating petal shapes on the side of a person's ribs, photographed in black and white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork mandala tattoo on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala sits on the side of the torso, with a central geometric medallion surrounded by layered petal-like rings. The design is built from fine stippled dots for shading, bold outlines and solid triangular highlights. The black and white photograph is framed close on the midriff, with the tattoo placed across the ribs.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Mandala Flower Geometric pattern Dot Medallion Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad never went to chapel without a pencil stub behind his ear, and the backs of the colliery dockets in our house were pricked all over with dots. He'd sit at the kitchen table after the back shift, the lamp still hanging by the door with its smell of paraffin, and press a compass point into the paper again and again until a flower came up out of the grey.

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Mam called them his rings. They ringed the table, the teapot and the bread knife. The men at the Ashworth pit called him Dotty Ned, which he took as a compliment, because he said a dot was the only honest mark a man could make. A line always wanted a ruler, and a ruler always wanted a manager standing over it.

The winter the fan at number two stopped, he came home quiet and drew nothing for a week. On the eighth night I found him in the yard with a torch, tracing the spokes of a rusted wheel that had been dumped by the slag heap, counting them under his breath. He said a thing that goes round can be made to hold still, if you put enough little points into it.

When the cage brought the men up that Friday, his sheet was folded in his jacket, the centre gone soft with pit damp. I pinned it above the range where the light catches it. Every time I fill the kettle I count the petals, and I get a different number each time, and I have decided to leave it that way.