Black dotwork mandala tattoo with layered petals centred on the upper back of a woman with long hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala of layered petals and concentric rings is tattooed across the upper back. The design is built from fine linework and dense stippled dots, with the shading giving depth to the inner rings. The tattoo is in black ink and sits at the centre of the frame, with the wearer's shoulders and camisole straps visible around it.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Flower Petal Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp room at Hollin Colliery smelled of paraffin and wet wool, and Mr Pryce counted the brass lamps back in at the end of every shift as if one might walk off up the drift on its own. I was seventeen that winter and he had given me the tally board, a slate with rows of tin numbers, and a stub of chalk that broke if you pressed it.

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My grandmother used to sit by the range on Sundays and draw rings in the coal dust on the hearthstone with the end of a hairpin. She called them her windows. Start in the middle, she said, and go round. Petals first, then the rings, then the dots that stop the eye sliding off the edge. I thought it was nonsense until the soot on the lamp glasses began to settle into the same pattern every night, a ring of black specks around each wick.

The night the cage stuck at the bottom, nobody came up for six hours. Mr Pryce sat with his back against the wall and I sat beside him, and because my hands needed something, I took the hairpin from my hair and drew on the dusty slate: a flower, then a ring, then another, dotting each petal with the point until the chalk had gone grey under my thumb. He watched me without speaking. When the cage finally rang, he lifted the slate, looked at it a long time, and wiped away only the numbers.

Next morning the flower was still there under the tallies, and it is still there, I suppose, on the lamp room wall, where the whitewash never quite took. Men touch it going past, for luck, the way you would touch a window to check it is shut. Start in the middle, I tell the new boys, and go round.