Black ink lotus mandala tattoo with ornate linework and dot details, centred on the upper back of a woman with her hand raised to her neck.

Lotus mandala tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare back shows a symmetrical lotus flower tattoo with layered petals filled with fine ornamental patterns. Short rows of dots extend above and below the central bloom. The ink is solid black with fine line detail, and the photograph has a warm, soft-focus background with the subject's head turned away from the camera.

Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Mandala Dot Flower

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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

Mind your fingers on the glass, the lot of you, and sit back where the lamp can't reach. No, Tommy, it isn't lit yet, that's only the dusk making the brass breathe. The lens at Scarrow Head came from Birmingham in forty crates, the year my grandmother was born. When the keeper's boy, Eli Varne, uncrated it, he said it looked like a lotus pond turned inside out, rings of prism stacked one inside another like petals that had decided to be stone.

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Eli had a sister, Marta, who painted hulls in the Porthcarrow yard. One February night, with the wind hammering the gallery, she traced those petals on the wet glass with her knuckle and counted them aloud. Then she drew them on his forearm in soot, and pricked a line of dots above and below the lens, so the light would have something to hang from. He called it foolish. She said a light needs a centre and a steady line either side, or the ships go wandering.

The winter the Ceres went down on the Teeth, fog sat on the water like wet wool for three days. The lamp turned and nothing came back through it. On the fourth night a small yellow lantern answered from the north, exactly where the dots said it should be. Eli never told anyone what his hands did during that hour, only that he kept the petals turning.

So when someone tells you a course can't be held in fog, remember Marta counting petals by touch in the dark.