Black and grey fine line lotus mandala tattoo with dangling drop details on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Lotus mandala tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line lotus flower with ornate, mandala-style inner petals and swirling scrollwork sits at the centre of the upper back. Chains of small dots and teardrop pendants hang below the bloom, drawn in single-weight black linework with light stippled shading. The photograph is black and white, with the subject's hair pinned up and the tattoo filling the middle of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Back Lotus Mandala Flower Pendant Drop Chain Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the third step, it gave way the winter my grandfather was born, and nobody has seen fit to mend it since. Now sit where the wall still keeps the wind off you, and I'll tell you about the lamp that hung in the Great Hall of Carrow, and the flower that grew up beneath it after the lamp was gone.

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The lord of Carrow had a chandelier of Venice glass, two hundred drops of it, each shaped like a tear and strung on silver chain. When the debts came calling he sold the chain to a pedlar from Bristol and the drops to a widow in Cardiff, and the hall went dark. The pedlar's cart, they say, broke its axle on the river road and the silver sank in the ford. Nobody went to fish for it. People don't, in Carrow, when a thing has been paid for in grief.

Now the cistern under the chapel floor had been dry since the siege, but the spring that fed it never stopped. In the third summer after the lamp was sold, a single lotus came up through the cracked flags. Mabon Teague, who kept the chapel keys and was too stubborn to die, went down with a candle and found it open in the dark, its petals layered like the mandalas his mother stitched on cushions, with fine scrolls at the heart and, hanging from its base, a line of dots and falling drops, as though the water had remembered the chain.

Mabon drew it on the back of his rent book before he would let anyone cut the stems. Every drop in that drawing, he said, was a debt paid back in light. Then he carried the book up to the lord's grave and read the names aloud until the rain came and blurred them.

Hear that? That's the drip from the chain. Off you go now, and mind the step.