Back of a woman's neck and upper back showing a black ornamental mandala tattoo in a V shape with dotted chain drapes, in a dotwork and geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and dotted drape across upper back

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a central mandala with a flower-like rosette, surrounded by intricate lace-like patterns in a V shape that runs from the nape of the neck onto the upper back. Fine dotted lines hang beneath the motif in scalloped swags, adding a beaded, draped effect. The work is rendered in black ink with no colour, and the dense linework and stippling are set against smooth skin on a dark-haired subject photographed from behind.

Dotwork Geometric Neck Back Mandala Lace Flower Dotted chain Ornament

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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

The lift in Halberd House has been dead since Tuesday, so you carry the bundle down the stairwell yourself, fourteen flights, your nan's lace shawl folded over one forearm like a waiter's cloth. It smells of carbolic soap and the cupboard under the stairs. On the sixth floor somebody's radio is playing brass band music, and below that a child is counting to a hundred in the echoey concrete, losing track somewhere in the forties and starting again.

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She wore the shawl to every wedding and funeral from 1961 until her hand stopped working, and after that it lived in tissue paper at the back of the wardrobe in the flat you now rent. Its centre is a rosette worked so tightly you can barely find the thread. Around it the lace runs out into points, and from the points hang rows of tiny black beads, each loop sagging a little lower than the one before, the way washing does when it has been wrung too hard.

At the top you carry it out to the drying rail on the balcony, shake it once, and peg each corner with two pegs. The wind comes straight off the motorway and lifts the points like something breathing. Dev from flat nine leans out of his window below and asks, not unkindly, whether you're planning to drip on his tomatoes. You say you'll move it. You don't.

Then the sun breaks through the cloud and the shawl throws its pattern down onto the car park, a flower of shadow spreading across the tarmac, the beads of water falling one by one from the hem. For a minute the whole estate is wearing it. You lean on the rail and count the drops, the way the child was counting, and you lose track at forty too, and you don't mind starting again.