Person seen from behind with a large black and grey mandala-style dotwork tattoo covering the upper back and waist, worn with denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala-style back piece

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is photographed from behind, with a large ornamental tattoo covering the back from the shoulder blades to the waist. The design is built from concentric medallions, lace-like scrollwork and fine dotted shading arranged symmetrically around a central vertical axis. The ink is black and grey, and the sepia-toned photograph softens the contrast across the skin while the denim shorts frame the lower edge of the piece.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Medallion Ornamental pattern Lace pattern Back piece

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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

Mrs Pennock had pricked the same parchment for three weeks before she let anyone see it, and by then the pins had worn grooves into the pine board. Nell watched her lay the sheet against the lamp and count the holes under her breath, the way other women counted rosary beads. Every medallion had to close on itself. Every scroll had to turn back at the exact pin where it had started, or the whole lace would sit crooked on the bobbins for a season and nobody in Honiton would forgive it.

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The commission had come up from London in a brown envelope with no name on it, only a drawing of a central line with rings stacked either side like coins on a windowsill. Nell wanted to ask why anyone would want a lace that size, a sheet as long as a door, but she had learned to keep questions behind her teeth. Mrs Pennock simply turned the parchment over and showed her the back, where the holes had gone through so cleanly that the lamplight came through in a hundred small suns.

When the lace came off the pillow in March it measured eleven yards of cream thread, and the medallions had settled into their places as if they had always been there. Nell carried the last length to the window and held it up to the grey light. One pin had been bent in the middle of the third ring, and the threads had been worked around it so neatly that nobody would notice unless they went looking.

Mrs Pennock left the bent pin where it was. She said a lace with no mistake in it was only a copy, and that the pattern would remember whichever way the hand had leaned.