Black ink floral mandala with two bird-like motifs on the lower back of a woman in a navy top, shown from behind.

Floral mandala tattoo on the lower back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, showing a symmetrical black design on her lower back. The central motif is a flower with layered petals and a dotted centre, flanked by curling scrollwork and two stylised bird heads with eye details at each end. The linework is bold and even, in solid black ink with no shading, and the design sits centrally across the lower spine against warm skin and a navy top.

Botanical Back Flower Mandala Bird Swirl Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp on Carrick Skerry burned yellow all winter, but in the week before the herring fleet sailed, Ruth Galloway climbed the stair with a tin of black paint and a brush made from her dead husband's shaving stick. The boats were leaving, nobody on the mainland would listen to a woman who said the sea wanted paying, and she had decided to speak to it in the only language she had left.

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She painted a flower on the whitewashed wall of the lamp room, its petals layered like a cabbage rose, with a dot of white at its heart. On either side she drew a bird with its head turned away from the other, each with a round eye and a beak as sharp as a fish hook. Above them she curled scrollwork the way spray curls back off a rock. When she finished, the great lens swung its light across the water, and the flower held the beam for a moment before letting it pass.

The fleet went out on the Monday. The sea came up grey and flat, and by dusk three boats that should have been home were nowhere to be seen. The men on the other boats watched the Skerry light for a long time, and then, low over the water, they saw two dark shapes turn back toward the rocks and guide the lost boats in through the gap, one on either side of the bow.

Ruth never said what she had asked the wall to do. But when the men climbed the stair to thank her, they found the lamp room swept, a fresh jar of tallow beside the door, and two black feathers laid on the sill, one for each bird.