Black dotwork mandala with a lotus centre and moon phases on a person's upper back, with dotted beaded strands hanging below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala with moon phases on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A circular mandala sits centred on the upper back, with a lotus-like flower at its heart surrounded by fine concentric rings. Below the circle, the design includes a row of crescent and full moon phases, and dotted chains with teardrop-shaped drops hang beneath it. The work uses stippled dots and fine black linework, with no colour, and the photograph is taken straight on against plain skin.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Lotus Moon phase Crescent moon Dot Bead Tassel Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Cold Harrow had forty-one trees, and every August Mother Ansel counted the windfalls before anyone was allowed to pick. She counted them by moonlight, dropping each one into a wooden bucket with a sound like a knuckle on a door. Her grandson Piers thought it was foolishness until the year the wasps came early and the bucket filled too fast.

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She told him the trees kept a tally of their own, and the moon was the clerk who checked it. When the moon was new, the trees gave what they had freely. When it swelled to a full round face, the trees gave double, because the moon was watching and would not be cheated. Between the two she said the fruit grew heavy and quiet, and that was the time to leave it alone.

Piers asked what the dots were for, the little strings of them that dropped from the lamp of the moon down the ladder to the grass. She said those were the beads the orchard paid out to anyone who had walked its rows at night and kept their mouth shut. Each drop was a name nobody had said aloud.

That September he walked the rows with his lantern unlit and his mouth shut, and the windfalls rolled to his feet one by one, round and bright as the moon at its full. He filled his pockets. At dawn he went to tell his grandmother, and found the bucket already brimming, and on the lid a single pear, sliced clean through, showing a white star of seeds at its heart.