Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo spanning the upper back and nape of the neck, with a partial mirrored design on the left shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo across the upper back and neck

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large, symmetrical mandala with a floral centre sits between the shoulder blades and extends up onto the nape of the neck, with a partial matching design on the left shoulder. The outlines are fine and precise, and the central petals and rings are shaded with stippled dots that build soft grey tones. The image is black and white, and the tattoo fills most of the frame against a dark background, with only the back of the head and one ear visible.

Dotwork Geometric Back Neck Mandala Flower Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clerk at Sallow Bridge would not stamp anyone through until Ilse had drawn the stone. It sat in the middle of the river, a grey knuckle of rock the two valleys had argued over for three generations, and every crossing was measured from it. Her grandmother's brass compass had worn to the colour of tea, and Ilse knew the stone could only be read from above, where its cracks fell into rings and the rings into petals.

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She drew it for the clerk, Anselm Groot, on a sheet of ledger paper with a fine steel nib. Each petal she traced twice, once for the stone and once for its shadow lying on the brown water. Where the river had pitted the rock she pricked tiny dots with a needle, and the dots built up under her thumb into soft grey hollows. It took her four days. On the fourth, the autumn rains came down the valley, and the stone went under.

The men of Lower Kell arrived the next week with a surveyor's chain and a claim that the boundary ran past the far bank. Groot laid Ilse's drawing across his desk and asked them to point to the stone. They could not, so they pointed to the paper. Every petal lined up with a mark on a bank, and the dots, which had pressed up through the sheet like water through cloth, sat exactly where the silt lay under the current. The clerk stamped the page and slid it across the desk, and the chain was left coiled on the floor.