Back view of a person with long red hair, showing a colourful mandala tattoo with botanical sprigs on the upper back and shoulder, with a canyon landscape behind.

Mandala and botanical tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a person seen from behind, with their long red hair falling over one shoulder, so the face is not visible. A large circular mandala of flowers and leaves is tattooed across the upper back, with fine black linework framing sprigs that extend outwards. The mandala is filled with purple, blue, green, pink and red, and sits against a canyon and river landscape in soft daylight.

Botanical Geometric Back Mandala Flower Leaves Sprig Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Thistle Wren came down the green water below the cliffs every spring with the snowmelt, and every spring the lock-keeper at the bend asked after the boatwoman's daughter, who had climbed the canyon wall for dye and never come back down. Her mother, Sorrel, said nothing about it. She only scrubbed the bow and waited for the water to rise.

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The daughter had painted a ring of flowers on that bow before she went up. She ground the colours from what grew on the banks: violet from the wild thistle, a deep blue from chicory, rust from the rock-rose, a pink she got by boiling the petals of a single late mallow. Round the ring she painted sprigs of rue reaching outward, as if the flowers were trying to root the boat to the river. People said that any barge with a painted ring would be carried home safely, and that was the only reason anyone ever bought the paint.

Sorrel had never liked the ring. It cost too much to keep fresh, she said, and the river did not read pictures. So she had scrubbed it off that autumn, and the spring flood came up early that year. The Wren went onto the shallows below the bend and stuck there, her hull singing against the stones, and nobody could find the channel in the dark.

In the morning the lock-keeper saw a ring of colour floating on the reeds. Sorrel had painted it again overnight with the last of the blue and the pink, working by lamplight with her daughter's brush. The flowers were still wet, and the water had lifted the barge clear. Sorrel took the tiller and didn't look back at the cliffs. A single purple petal drifted past the lock, turning slowly all the way to the sea.