Fine line black and grey geometric mandala tattoo on the upper back beside the shoulder blade.

Geometric mandala on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small, symmetrical mandala made of overlapping circles and an eight-pointed star sits on bare skin. The thin, precise linework is supported by fine stippling in the centre, and the design is shown in black ink and grey tones. The tattoo is centred in the frame against a soft, light background with a dark garment at the left edge.

Fine line Geometric Dotwork Back Mandala Geometric Circle Star Flower

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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

Mind the ring, boy, and don't step on the chalk. That circle's older than the tent. My mother's father drew it with a length of rope and a nail the summer the big top first went up over Hollin Common, and every ringmaster since has been too stubborn or too skint to redraw it. Look close. Those are not one circle but nine, lapping over each other like dropped hoops, and inside them sits the star, eight points, the way the old posters used to show us where the lions slept.

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The Halloran Brothers had eight wagons then and a calliope that could be heard in Kettering. By the time you were born the wagons were sheds and the calliope had a cracked reed that played only one note, which we pretended was a hymn. Still, every morning Mrs Pargeter swept the sawdust back into that pattern before the elephant came out. Nobody asked her why. I asked once, and she tapped the middle, where the dots were, and said the sand had to remember where the centre was.

The winter the bank called in the loan, we sold the ponies and kept the ring. Mrs Pargeter died in the February frost with her broom still in her hand. When they came to carry her out, the sawdust in the middle had been pressed so fine by a hundred years of boots that it looked like smoke, and her broom had drawn the star one last time, every point sharp as a needle.

So you see, boy, a circus is only a shape that people agree to walk round. Mind the chalk.