Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo with lotus petals and a long pointed line running down the centre of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and lotus tattoo on a back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornamental design covers the upper and middle back, built from stacked circular mandala motifs with floral rosettes and scrollwork. The shading is made from fine stippled dots and clean linework, giving depth without any colour. The design narrows to a long pointed line that runs down the spine, and the composition is centred on the back against a plain light wall.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Lotus Ornament Floral Scrollwork Rosette Petal Spine

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the cat, she's been sleeping on the bobbins since Tuesday. You want to know how Mrs Pell got her pattern right, and I'll tell you, because the whole of Hallow Fen knows it and few of you ever listened. She had a tin of pins, a card of linen thread, and a drawing of a lotus that wouldn't keep still on the paper.

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Every evening she pinned the circles one inside another, a rosette within a ring, a ring within a ring, until the cushion on her knee looked like the rose window at Ely with the light taken out of it. Her husband Walter, who mended the sluice gates and believed in nothing he could not drop a weight on, said the thing would never hang true. Eleven years she'd tried. Each spring the middle went lopsided, as though the petals were leaning towards the river.

Then in March the drainage men came through measuring the dyke, and Walter brought one home. A lead bob the size of a hen's egg on a length of black cord. She hung it from the lamp hook over the cushion and watched it settle. Then she pinned down from the point of it, and down, and every petal sat square on that line as if the lead had been drawn into the pattern itself.

They say the lace went to the Lincoln fair that autumn and nobody could find where the centre stopped. Walter kept the plumb line on the nail by the door. When the wind comes off the Wash it still swings, and the bob comes to rest pointing at the flagstones, always at the same stone, which is the one she sat on.