Back of a neck with a black and grey dotwork mandala and star tattoo, shading into colour ornamental designs lower down the neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and star neck tattoo

Dotwork · Neck · Mixed · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a woman's neck and head, with her hair pulled up, and a large ornamental tattoo across the nape. A black and grey mandala with paisley-like motifs and four small stars sits at the top, built from stippled dots and fine linework. Below, bolder pink, red and green ornamental shapes and leaf-like forms extend down the neck and into the shoulder area.

Dotwork Neck Mandala Paisley Star Ornament Floral

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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

Pull your chairs in closer, the lot of you, because the wind's turned and I'll not be shouting over it. You want to know why old Cassius Trewin never went out past the Gull Rock without his lamp shutter pricked? I'll tell it my way.

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Back in the year the herring went north, the Sarah Ann and seven other luggers worked out of Porthrune, and every one of them carried a chart drawn by Mary Keel, who kept the chandlery and had hands like a jeweller. She'd sit at the kitchen table with a needle and a sheet of card and prick the dots, hundreds of them, close as frost, then lay in the fine lines between: leaf and petal and curling spiral, until the whole thing looked like a flower opening at night. Four points she made larger, one at each quarter, and those were the stars the fleet steered by.

Her boy Daniel went out on the Morwenna the autumn the fog came down thick as wool. Eleven hours past the light and no sign of him. Mary stood on the harbour wall holding her chart up to the lamp, and the light came through every pricked dot, scattering across the water like a fistful of sparks. Daniel told us later he saw the four bright holes first, small gold points in the grey, and sailed for them as if someone had written them on the sky.

So when you ask why Cassius never goes out bare, you know now. Every hole in that card is a place the light got through. Mind your step on the wall, it's wet.