Black and grey dotwork and fine line mandala tattoo centred on the upper back below the neck, with a person's head and shoulders visible.

Mandala tattoo on the upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical mandala sits on the upper back, built from layered lotus-like petals, a central star and fern-like sprigs radiating outwards. The design uses fine outlines with stippled dotwork shading that gives the petals depth and a soft gradient. The image is in black and grey, with the tattoo framed by bare skin, a black top and blurred green foliage behind.

Dotwork Fine line Geometric Back Mandala Lotus Flower Fern Star Leaves Pattern

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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

The wasps have found the windfalls under the Bramley rows before you do, and your uncle's ladder is still leaning where he left it in June. You drag the first sack along the grass, bracken brushing your shins, and think about how the orchard was always his arithmetic: forty trees, a hundred and twelve crates in a good year, and a dog called Pippin who would not come in until the dew had gone.

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Mrs Okonedo from the cooperative rings on Thursday to ask whether the trees will be cut before the autumn sale. You say nothing yet. Instead you take a Cox from the grass, sit on the low wall, and do what he taught you: cut it across the middle, not from stalk to base. The flesh falls open and there it is, a five-pointed star of seeds sitting in a ring of pale chambers, each one a petal, each one tucked inside the next like a letter folded by someone who meant to keep it.

You turn the halves over in your palm and remember the backs of old invoices covered in his dotted shading, made with a biro for hours while the kettle went cold. He never called it drawing. He called it getting the sums right. Every leaf he counted was a leaf that didn't need spraying, and every row he pruned was a row he could still walk in the morning.

You don't ring Mrs Okonedo back. You drag the ladder to the oldest tree, climb until the wasps have nowhere left to go but the fallen fruit, and pick the first apple you can reach. You cut it open right there on the rung, just to see the star again, and you count the seeds out loud, all five points, the way he used to.