Woman seen from behind with a large black and grey dotwork mandala covering her back, with a coloured sleeve tattoo on her upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala back piece in dotwork and blackwork

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large mandala design fills the back, with a central radiating star surrounded by ornate geometric rings and a smaller medallion at the nape of the neck. The design is built from fine dots and stippled shading, with solid black areas framing the piece and clean pale edges around the outline. A coloured sleeve tattoo with pink, yellow and green tones is visible on the upper arm against a plain pale wall.

Dotwork Geometric Blackwork Back Upper arm Mandala Star Medallion Geometric pattern Floral motif Back piece Sleeve

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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 rose window above platform four had been cracked since the winter, and Nell Garrity had been asked to find out whether the iron could be saved or whether the whole star would have to come down. She climbed the scaffold at six, before the first northbound, and sat with her flask balanced on a girder while the sky went from grey to pewter over the sidings.

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The ironwork was older than the line. Some Victorian engineer had cast a radiating star of twelve points, then ringed it with smaller rosettes, each one ground by hand so the joints would hide the seams. Nell ran her thumb along a hairline fracture and counted the rings the way her grandmother had counted stitches. Nine, ten, the innermost medallion no bigger than a dinner plate. Someone had drawn the whole thing in pencil before a single bolt was cut, and she could still see the faint compass marks on the underside.

By nine the platform was busy and the star had given up its secret. The crack ran from the outermost point to the centre, which meant the damage was not in the iron at all but in the bolt that held the medallion to the frame. The stationmaster, Reg Olphin, came up the ladder with two coffees and asked her, as if it were a small thing, whether she could fix it without taking the roof down.

She could. It would take a month and a lot of patience, and she would have to match the pattern by hand because nothing made now would sit right. When she came down the last rung the morning light had come through the star and laid a perfect pale wheel across the tiles, and for once she did not want to walk away from it.