Back of a woman with a metallic gold mandala design with hanging chain details, styled as a geometric temporary tattoo on the upper back.

Gold mandala tattoo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

A woman faces away from the camera, showing a large mandala design on her upper back. The design has a central eight-petalled flower surrounded by layered scalloped petals, fine dotted rings and leaf-like motifs, with chain-style drops hanging from the lower edge. The outline is crisp and the fill is a metallic gold-white, set against warm skin and a black top, with trees blurred in the background.

Geometric Back Mandala Flower Lotus Chain Ornament Metallic

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats had been out four nights when Maud Penhallow took the last of her father's gold from the drawer under the bench and began to beat it flat. The harbourmaster came to the forge and told her gold was no use to a drowned man. She did not look up from the anvil. She said she was not making it for the men.

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She worked through the cold hours. She hammered the sheet into eight petals and scalloped the edge of each one, then pricked fine rings of dots around a centre so small it could be covered with a fingernail. Along the lower rim she hung a chain of tiny links, one for every boat still out past the breakwater, and she counted them aloud as she closed each ring with her pliers. By morning her hands were blistered and the thing lay on the bench like a flower that had opened in the dark.

At low water she carried it down the slip wrapped in sailcloth and waited for the tide to turn. The gulls were already shouting over the harbour mouth when she unwrapped it and let it slide off her palm into the green water. It sank slowly, the chain paying out behind it like a line thrown from a boat, and then the water closed over it and the harbour was only grey again.

Seven boats came in on the afternoon tide, late and slow, their sails patched and their crews too tired to speak. Maud did not go down to meet them. She walked the shingle instead and found the chain links washing up among the weed, one by one, each still bright. She gathered them into a tin and kept it on the windowsill. When the old men asked her what the gold had bought, she said the sea had only wanted the chain, and the rest of it had been hers to keep.