Black dotwork mandala tattoo with an om symbol on a person's upper back, with a hand resting beside it bearing the words This too shall pass.

Mandala back tattoo with om symbol

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black mandala tattoo with a central om symbol sits on the upper back, built from layered petals, scrollwork and dotted borders. The linework is bold and even, with dense fill in the petals and open, lighter areas in the inner rings. The image is in black ink only and is framed by a hand resting on the shoulder, with a small hamsa tattoo visible at the top right.

Dotwork Blackwork Back Hand Mandala Om symbol Lotus Hamsa Hand Lettering Dot Scrollwork

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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 oven door sticks at ten to four, as it always does in January, and you lean your hip into it the way Mrs Okafor taught you before she retired to Margate. Flour sits on the steel table in a thin grey skin. Outside on Lark Street the lamps are still yellow and nobody has bothered the bins yet.

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You work the laminated dough in rings. Fold, turn, fold, turn. The butter goes in as a cold slab and comes out as a hundred layers you can't see but can feel when you press a thumb down and watch it spring back. The starter has been fed since midnight and smells of green apples and something close to vinegar. You dust the board with rice flour and cut the first pale circle, then another, each a little wider, until the table holds a spiral of rounds.

Ruth comes in at quarter past five with her bicycle clips still on, wanting the seeded rolls for the school gate. She looks at the trays and says they look like something out of a church window. You tell her it's only scoring. You cut a lattice of petals into the first batch and a cross-hatch into the second, and on the last loaf you let the blade wander into a small curl at each edge, a scroll you make without thinking.

When the sun finally pushes grey over the rooftops the loaves sit cooling on the rack, cracked and blistered, ticking as they settle. Ruth buys the one with the curls and pays in coppers. Left alone, you wipe the blade, wrap the leftover dough in a damp cloth and notice the window has gone the colour of milk. You start again.