Black and grey geometric mandala tattoo centred between the shoulder blades of a woman seen from behind, wearing a black hat and black strappy dress.

Mandala tattoo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A fine-lined, symmetrical mandala with a flower-like outer ring of petals and concentric inner rings sits on the upper back. The design is rendered in black ink with solid and hatched detail, and no colour is present. The plain black dress and hat sit against a green garden backdrop, with the tattoo as the clear focal point.

Geometric Back Mandala Flower Petal Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Dunmore sat on the step of the lamp room with a stub of chalk and a bucket of cold tea, copying what the coal had done. Her brother Tom had come up from the Ashgill face with his palms torn and a flake of black stone in his fist, its edge curled out like a petal. She turned it to the grey light from the yard and saw rings inside rings, each one hatched fine as a hymn-book shadow, as if the seam had folded in on itself over a thousand years and kept its shape.

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She drew it on the flags before the shift bell. Eight petals first, then a ring, then another, then the tight little star at the heart where the pressure had been greatest. Her hand was steady because she had been stitching dark wool for her mother since she was seven. By the time the first cage came up, half the women from Row Four were crouched beside her with their own scraps of slate, and nobody spoke about the overman, who had already shouted that the yard was not a schoolroom.

He came back at dinner with a bucket and a broom, and found the pattern whole. It had rained in the night and the chalk had bled at the edges, so the petals looked softer, almost open. He stood looking at it for a long time, then set the bucket down without filling it and walked off towards the pithead.

Tom laid the flake on the windowsill of the lamp room, where the low sun came through the grime and threw its rings across the floor. Nell watched the shadows lie over the chalk lines and thought that the mine had only ever taken the coal, never the pattern, and that somebody would always come back for it.