Black and grey lotus mandala tattoo in dotwork and fine line style on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Lotus mandala on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lotus flower with layered petals and a patterned centre sits on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. The linework is fine and precise, with stippled dotwork filling the petals and small dots scattered around the outline. The tattoo is in black and grey ink, and the plain background of a bamboo screen with paper sketches keeps the focus on the design.

Dotwork Fine line Back Lotus Mandala Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maggie Rourke had been pricking dots into the wet lime of the chapel wall since the strike ended, and the men of Hollin Pit took it for grief. It was not grief. She was counting. Each dot was a bore hole her father had sunk the year before the roof came down, and she had found his figures folded inside the hymn book, in the same careful hand he used for the wages.

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She drew the petals outward from the centre, one ring at a time, because her father used to say a seam opens like a flower when you work it from the middle. The old pit captain came by with his cap in his hands and asked what the pattern was for. She told him it was a lotus. He had never seen one. Nobody in Hollin had. The nearest water was the reservoir at Crake, and that was black as tar and twice as sour.

On the feast of Saint Brigid the ground under the chapel gave a low groan, like a cart taking the weight of a bridge. The men dug where her outermost petal pointed and broke into a pocket of coal so clean it rang when struck, and beneath it lay the old working her father had marked. They brought the coal up in baskets, and nobody was lost for it. The captain paid for a new roof and never once asked about the wall.

Maggie left the last petal unfinished. Some say the flower is still down there, grown through the rock where no lamp reaches, its roots feeling for the water it was promised. Maggie said the open dot was for whoever came counting after her, so they would know exactly where she had stopped.