Black ornamental tattoo across a woman's upper back, resembling a jewelled necklace with a central mandala pendant, floral motifs and dotted drops, seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala necklace design across upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hair in a loose bun is seen from behind, with a large black ornamental tattoo spanning her upper back. The design resembles a jewelled necklace, with a scalloped band of floral motifs, a central mandala pendant and a dotted chain ending in teardrop drops. Fine linework and stippled dotwork shading are rendered in black ink on smooth skin under soft, even lighting.

Dotwork Botanical Back Mandala Necklace Pendant Floral Dotwork Jewellery Teardrop Chain

Find an artist for this

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 tinker's widow paid me in pennies and a sack of rye, and in return I was to learn how to dot copper. Every morning before the smithy lit its fire I sat at the edge of the wood with a sheet of soft metal across my knees and a nail in my fist. Tap, tap, tap. The dots had to be the same distance apart or the chain would not lie flat, she said, and a chain that does not lie flat is only wire for hanging things on.

Keep reading

The village ran down to the beeches, and the beeches ran up into country nobody in living memory had walked through. Old Marta kept her tools in a box lined with felt, and inside the lid she had pinned a drawing of a pendant: a rosette of petals with a dark stone at its heart, and from it a row of teardrops hanging like rain that had decided to stop. She said the original had gone into the ground with her mother. I asked where the ground was. She pointed through the window at the trees.

I worked through that winter and most of the next. The mandala I did in rings, outermost first, so the petals would sit on the copper like frost on glass. The teardrops took longest. Each needed its point struck true and its belly rounded without cracking, and I ruined four before the fifth held. When the chain was finished I threaded the drops through the links myself, counting under my breath as the church bell rang the hours.

In spring the woodcutters came and the beeches fell in a single week. I stood among the stumps with the finished pendant in my palm and found one teardrop still on my bench, unhung. Marta had left it there with no chain to hold it. I never learned whether she meant it as a gift or a reproach. I hung it on the chain anyway, at the very bottom, where it would swing free over whatever I wore next.