Black ink lotus flower tattoo with mandala detailing on the upper back of a woman lying on a striped towel.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman lies face down on a striped towel, showing a black lotus tattoo centred between her shoulder blades. The flower is built from layered petals filled with fine linework, dotted shading and mandala-style ornament, with a small dangling motif below. The image is in black ink only, shot from above and behind with her hair falling across the right side of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Mandala Flower Ornament Hair

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

Tuesday, gone two in the morning, and the printing shed on Sheep Street has finally gone quiet except for the tick of the cooling drum. Mr Hallam wants the lotus cut down for the spring run: eight petals instead of thirteen, and the dots taken out because they clog the ink on the calico. I told him the dots are the whole point. Without them the flower is just a flat thing that sits on the cloth.

Keep reading

I have been cutting this block since the Thursday before last, pear wood from the timber yard by the canal, with the small gouge my grandmother brought from Lahore in a tin of camphor. She carved the same kind of flower into teak for her customers, and she used to say a block should never be finished in one sitting, because the wood remembers the hurry. So I cut the outer petals in daylight, then the inner ones after my shift, and I counted every dot twice so none of them would land on the wrong side of a curve.

Tonight I pulled a proof before going home. The ink took on the thirteen petals and the shading came up grey and soft, layered like a bloom opening one fold at a time, with the little drop hanging below the centre where the stem should be. It looked less like a pattern and more like something that had been waiting in the dark for someone to notice it.

I folded the proof into my coat and left the block on the bench, under a damp cloth. Mr Hallam will find the new sample on his desk tomorrow, with its one dark bead of ink hanging beneath the flower, and he will have to decide whether it is a mistake.