Woman seen from behind with a large black dotwork mandala tattoo across her back and mandala tattoos on both forearms.

Mandala back piece with forearm mandalas

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with short blonde hair stands outdoors in front of a grey wooden fence, her hands clasped behind her head and her back to the camera. A large symmetrical mandala design in solid black outline and dotwork shading covers most of her back, with lotus-like petals, scalloped panels and a dark central motif. Smaller black and grey mandala tattoos sit on both forearms, and the whole piece is rendered in black ink only.

Blackwork Dotwork Back Forearm Mandala Lotus Ornament Flower Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiles came over on the Thursday boat, wrapped in sacking that smelled of brine, and Nell counted them twice on the chapel step before she would sign for them. Four hundred and twelve lotus petals, each cut by her grandfather's hand before his eyes went, each meant to mirror its neighbour across the floor like a held breath. Only the centre was missing. Everyone on Scarra called it the black eye, though it was just a square of Delabole slate he had never got round to carving.

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She knelt through the first week with the mortar bucket and a flask of tea the vicar kept bringing her cold. The petals spread outward from the middle in rings, scalloped and striped, and every ring closed neatly except the outermost, which ran one tile short on the north side. She tried turning pieces, tried cutting a new one, and each time the petal pointed the wrong way, as if the floor itself were leaning towards the door.

On the Sunday she found his ledger in the vestry drawer, under a tin of cough sweets. The page for St Anwen's was drawn in fine ink dots, a circle of them, and beneath it he had written in pencil: Leave the dark for what the sea gives back. Nell went down to the shingle at low water and walked the tideline until she found it, a fragment of blue glaze, the corner of a plate from the Sweet Marian, lost off the rocks the winter before last.

She set the shard in the outer ring that evening and the petals closed without a gap. The next morning the western window threw the sun straight down the nave, and the black slate in the centre took the light and held it, so that the whole lotus seemed to open around a hole in the floor the shape of a boat's keel.