Dotwork mandala tattoo with a blue and orange spiral galaxy at its centre, placed across the middle of a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Galaxy mandala on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large circular mandala covers the centre of a person's back, with a radiating outer ring of petal, arch and point shapes built from fine linework and stippled dots. At the heart sits a spiral galaxy in deep blue with small specks of light and a glowing orange core, shaded to suggest depth. The black linework and grey dotwork frame the colour centre, which stands out against the pale skin and dark blue curtain behind.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Galaxy Star Circle Petal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tamsin had been counting the cattle grids on the Old Salter road since Wenlow, and by the fortieth she had stopped counting anything but the water temperature needle, which kept creeping toward red. The van coughed, rolled onto the verge and died in a bank of grey sage. She sat with her hands on the wheel and waited for the engine to tick itself cool.

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Outside, the dark was total in the way only open desert allows. Her father had taught her the constellations from the flatbed of a truck in Arizona when she was nine, pointing with a cigarette he never lit. He had also told her that every sky was a map someone had already drawn, and the trick was finding the centre. She walked out with a torch, lifted the bonnet and found the hose split clean along one seam, the coolant gone to a dark stain on the sand.

She had gaffer tape and a length of spare rubber in the back, which was luck, and a bottle of water, which was less. While she worked, she tipped her head back. The Milky Way hung across the road like spilt flour, and high over the ridge a faint spiral turned slowly, pale blue along its arms, with a warm glow at its middle. She knew it was not a star at all but a whole crowded city of them, too far away to hear.

When the van started, she didn't drive off. She sat with the door open and the engine running low, and drew the spiral on the back of a petrol receipt with the pen from her glovebox, ringing it with petals and points the way her father used to on napkins. The receipt went into the glovebox with the others. She drove on at a steady thirty, headlights dimmed, and by dawn the ridge had turned the colour of a peach stone's heart.