Black ink mandala tattoo on the upper back of a woman with long dark hair, seen from behind in an open-back top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with one hand raised into her long dark hair. A black ink mandala with radiating petal shapes sits centrally on her upper back, between the shoulder blades. The linework appears fine and detailed, and the image is entirely black and grey against a pale, softly lit background.

Geometric Back Mandala Ornament

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

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, and mind the draught from that door, it has a temper like my late husband's. The Gull's Rest was not always a boarding house. In my grandmother's day it was a chandler's, and the man who kept it, Abel Pryce, could cut brass so fine you could read the Lord's Prayer through the petals of a ring. He was a silent sort. He had lost two fingers to a winch when he was twelve and never once complained of them.

Keep reading

One November a schooner came in off the Hollow Bank with her mast gone and her crew half drowned, and among them was a girl called Ruth Tamsin who had been sewing sails since she could hold a needle. She carried a bundle of lamp-wicks and a drawing on oiled paper: a circle inside a circle, with petals radiating from one point like the spokes of a wheel turned inside out. She wanted Abel to cut it in pewter so it could hang over the harbour lamp. Nobody could say why. She said her father had drawn it from memory the night before he went over the side.

Abel worked on it for nine weeks by a lamp he never let go out. Every evening he laid the drawing flat, and every morning there was one more petal finished, cleaner than the last, until the thing was done. On the first clear night they hung it over the water, and the light went through every hole and laid a star across the waves. The Bank boats came home that winter without a single loss.

Ruth never came back for it. Abel kept the pewter on his bench for the rest of his life, and when they cleared the shop after he died, the drawing was still tucked under the lamp, creased soft, with a second circle pencilled in the middle that nobody could explain. Some say it was a map. I say it was a door. Now, who wants the last of the seed cake?