Black ink lotus mandala tattoo with dotwork accents centred on a woman's upper back.

Lotus mandala tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus flower sits centrally on the back, built from layered petals filled with fine linework, paisley-like motifs and small stippled circles. Dots run vertically above and below the flower, adding a sense of balance to the composition. The tattoo is rendered in black ink with light grey shading behind the inner petals, and the photograph is taken from directly behind the subject against a plain wall.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Mandala Dot Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mariam had the oven door open before the bells at Hollin Cross finished their third stroke, and the heat rolled out past her like a dog that knew the way. The bread on the long board was still dark at the edges. Her grandmother had always said the first batch told you what the year would be, and this one had risen crooked, one loaf fatter on the left than the right.

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Her neighbour Tobias came to the back gate with his cart and his cough. He wanted flour on credit, as everyone in the valley wanted it in winter. She gave him two sacks and said nothing about the debt, because that kind of debt was carried in the chest rather than written in a ledger. Instead she showed him the tray of rolls she had shaped that morning, each one folded in on itself petal by petal, with a dot of poppy seed at the centre and a line of seeds running down the middle like the stitching on a coat.

He laughed and said they looked like the lotus painted on the chapel ceiling. Nobody eats a flower, he said. She told him her grandmother had eaten one once, boiled with nettles in a famine year, and had lived to tell it, which was the reason the recipe existed at all. The rolls were for the ones with no bread and no coin, to be set on the step before light so nobody had to ask.

When the sun came over the ridge the step was bare and the tray was eleven rolls lighter. Tobias came back for the sacks, set them down, and took the crooked loaf from the rack without a word. Mariam let him. Some things the oven could not decide for you.