Black and grey dotwork lotus flowers and geometric mandala tattoo across the upper back and nape of the neck.

Lotus and geometric mandala on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is shown from behind with silver-white braided hair tied in a bun, displaying a large tattoo across the upper back and nape. The design centres on two lotus flowers above a layered mandala and a fine-lined geometric shape with a vertical line descending below. The shading is built from stippled dots and bold black outlines, with the petals left in light grey and the composition filling the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Back Neck Lotus Mandala Flower Geometric Sacred geometry Line Dot

Find an artist for this

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

The commission came up the hill on a Tuesday, rolled inside a sailcloth tube and tied with fishing twine. Teodora Vane untied it at the drawing table with her tea going cold beside her, and found a lotus drawn in pencil so faint she had to tilt the sheet to the lamp to read the note beneath it: Hold the tide. Do not rush the dots.

Keep reading

The harbourmaster's widow wanted a sundial for the breakwater, though she could not say why. Teodora spent three nights building it from compasses and a brass ring, working outward from a single point the way her grandfather had taught her, each circle of petals a little smaller than the last. The dots were the hard part. She pricked them in with a needle dipped in soot, one at a time, until her thumb went numb and the page began to look like the surface of the sea under rain.

On the fourth night a gull struck the window and the lamp guttered. When she looked back at the drawing, a straight black line ran down from the lowest petal to the edge of the paper, which she had not drawn. Beside it the pencil lotus had opened another row of petals, bright in the lamplight, as though someone had been working on it in her absence.

She did not finish the sundial. She folded the sheet into quarters, carried it down to the quay at dawn, and pinned it to the mast of the first boat out. The tide turned, the line on the paper pointed due south, and the widow, who had been waiting on the slip with her hands in her coat, nodded once as if a debt had been paid.