Black ink lotus and mandala tattoo running down the upper back of a person with long dark hair, in a fine line botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare upper back shows a tattoo of a mandala-style ornament at the top, with a lotus flower, leaves and a hanging pendant below it, extending from the nape towards the middle of the back. The design is built from fine black linework with some dotted shading and fine detail within the petals and mandala rings. The tattoo is in black ink only, with the skin tone and a pale background framing it, and the composition is centred on the spine.

Fine line Botanical Back Lotus Mandala Leaves Floral Ornament Pendant

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 rain has been coming sideways down Kirkgate since seven, and by eleven the awning over your stall is sagging like a wet sail. You have been trying to sell the brass lamp for an hour. Nobody wants a lamp in weather like this. They want soup and a dry bus shelter. Then a boy in a yellow cagoule stops, reads the tag, and asks whether it still lights.

Keep reading

It does, you tell him, if you're patient with the wick. The lamp came from a house clearance in Shipley, a dead man's hallway, and its base is cast in petals that open like a flower when the light is behind them. You turned it over for a week before you priced it. The boy says his gran had one just like it, the same bloom cut into the glass shade, and he wants to know if you have the matching shade anywhere. You don't, not on the trestle. But there is a crate of cracked ones under the tarpaulin, and you kneel in the puddle to dig through them.

Under the chipped ones there is one whole shade, pale green, with a lotus pressed into the glass in fine dotted lines. You hold it up to the grey light and the rain runs down the outside of it in threads. The boy holds his breath as though it might fall. You wrap it in yesterday's newspaper and tuck it into his arms, and he presses coins into your palm, mostly coppers. You let him keep the change.

He leaves, and the market thins until only the gulls and the drip from the canvas are left. You sit on an upturned crate and count the coins twice. When you finally stand, the lamp is still burning on the trestle, and its shadow lies across the wet cobbles, a small bloom opening in the rain.