Grey dotwork lotus tattoo with ornamental petals and dotted accents, centred on the upper back below the neck.

Lotus mandala on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single lotus flower tattoo sits centred on the upper back, below the nape of the neck, with the subject's face out of frame. The design is built from layered, ornamental petals with fine hatching and stippled dot shading, and a row of small dots extends above and below the flower. The ink is entirely grey and black, set against warm skin in soft, even natural light.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Flower Mandala Petal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third week out of Gravesend the Marguerite had stopped feeling like a ship and started feeling like a clock, and I was the only one aboard who still wound it. Mr Pell, the chart-master, had taught me to draw a rose on the back of every log page, petal over petal, so my hand would learn the pattern before the sea taught it anything else.

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Each morning I took the lead line to the forepeak and called the depths. Thirty fathoms. Twenty-six. Nineteen. I marked each sounding in Indian ink, a single dot above the rose and a single dot below it, and when the water shoaled toward the Dogger Bank the dots crowded together until they touched like beads on a wet string. Captain Hallam read them over my shoulder without speaking, his thumb working the brass button of his coat.

On the ninth night the fog came down thick enough to hide the bowsprit, and the sounding that came up the line was fourteen fathoms, then twelve, then nine. Hallam wanted the bearing set by dead reckoning. Pell wanted the lead kept going. I kept going, because the line was in my hands and the lead does not care who is captain. Seven fathoms. Six. Then the sand came up sticky on the tallow, and I knew the bank was nearer than any of the charts believed.

We brought her about by lantern light, and in the grey before dawn the Marguerite slid back into deeper water like a petal folding shut. When the lookout finally called the Norfolk coast, I turned the log over and found the rose I had drawn in the first week, and beneath it, in my own small hand, the last sounding of the night: six fathoms, and sand.