Dark mandala tattoo with a floral centre and dangling dots on the shoulder, with a second design partly visible on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a woman's shoulder and upper back showing a dark, finely detailed mandala-style design with a floral centre, scrollwork and a teardrop outline that ends in dangling dots. Fine dotted and lined patterns fill the motif, and a partial second design with curling lines is visible behind the strap on the upper back. The ink is solid black-brown against warm skin, with a soft, blurred background.

Shoulder Back Mandala Floral Teardrop Dot Scrollwork Paisley

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

Nobody on the ninth floor believed Mrs Adeyemi about the lift until the power went in March. The whole block dropped into black at once, and the stairwell filled with neighbours carrying torches, flasks and worried faces. Mrs Adeyemi did not come down with them. She sat on the landing with a yoghurt pot of brown paste and a pencil behind her ear, and she drew on the painted wall a teardrop with a flower in its belly, the way her mother had drawn them on the palms of brides in a village nobody on the ninth floor could find on a map.

Keep reading

"It holds the lift up," she told Tomasz from flat 41, when he asked what she was doing in the dark. "Every line is a rope." She worked the scrollwork outward from the centre, pressing small dots in rows, then the long point of the teardrop, which she finished with a single drop of paste hanging from its tip like a bead on a curtain. Tomasz laughed and went down to find candles. When he came back up, the lift was humming somewhere below him, and every flat on the landing had its lights on except hers, though her landing was bright enough to read by.

The lift had been stuck on the ground floor for two years. After that night it ran as if nothing had ever been wrong with it. Over the following weeks, the children on the ninth floor found small brown dots of dried paste on the stairs, one on every landing, and they collected them in jam jars and counted them out loud.

When the lift stopped again the next winter, people knocked on Mrs Adeyemi's door and waited with their hands out, and she came out with her pot and her pencil and asked each of them which floor they were trying to reach.