Black and grey mandala tattoo with dotwork detail across the upper back of a woman with her hair held up, outdoors.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo across a woman's upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with her hair gathered up and her bare back in focus. A large, symmetrical mandala tattoo sits centrally on the upper back, with radiating petal shapes, concentric rings and fine dotwork shading. The image has warm, sunlit tones and a soft blue background, while the ink itself is black and grey.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Skerry Cove could say how long the rings had been on the boarding house floor, only that Mrs Affleck swept around them every morning and never once through. They were scratched into the flagstones of the hall with a nail, one circle inside another, eleven of them, each one broken into petals by a line the width of fishing twine.

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Her husband had made them the winter the herring failed. He sat cross-legged in the cold hall with a tin of lamp black and a compass he had taken off a drowned man's boat, and he worked from the centre outward, dotting each ring with his thumb until the stone looked like frost. Folk who lodged there said the pattern kept the draughts out. The landlady said it kept him in, which was nearer the truth, because he had stopped going down to the harbour.

When the spring tides came in that year, the water rose through the cellar grate and stood a foot deep across the hall. It lay on the flags for three days. Mrs Affleck waded through it every morning with a broom, and on the third morning she found the rings had filled with clear water, every petal holding its own small lamp of sky, while the outermost circle had gone dark with silt where the sea had settled.

She left the water where it was. Her husband came down the stairs on the fourth day, read the tide in the marks on the wall, and went out to find the boat the drowned man had sailed. Nobody in the cove has ever said he found it. The rings are still there, though, and the water comes and goes through them now without a sound, the way it does through anything a person has bothered to draw carefully enough.

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