Black fine-line Om symbol inside an ornate mandala tattoo on the upper back, near the shoulder blade, beside a long braid tied with copper bands.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Om symbol in a mandala on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black Om symbol sits at the centre of an ornate circular mandala with pointed, petal-like edges, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is fine and detailed, with small dotted and scalloped patterns in the outer ring. The image is shown in black ink only, against pale skin and a white top, with a dark braid tied with copper bands in the left foreground.

Geometric Back Om symbol Mandala Braid

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The copper bands were my mother's doing, not Ravi's, though he let the whole Palais believe he had hammered them himself. She cut them from the base of a dead kettle the night before the Saturday dance and beat them flat on the back step with a teaspoon, because the proper mallet had gone to the pawn shop on Coventry Road along with the wedding clock.

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Ravi drew the lotus on the back of a tram ticket with a carpenter's pencil. Eight petals, their edges scalloped and dotted like the rim of a biscuit tin, and in the middle the Om, the curl and the hook and the small dot above it. He said a circle with nothing at its heart would spin itself right out of the room, and he was not a man who made idle remarks. He pinned the ticket to the lining of his jacket so it would not be lost in the crush at the door.

By nine the floor was a sheet of wet light. The band slid into a foxtrot, and the dots of the outer ring, which Ravi insisted were counts and not decoration, ran under our shoes like a second clock. My mother stood at the cloakroom hatch with her arms folded, watching the braid of her own hair swing as she turned to take a coat, and she did not once look at the dancers. She was counting the hooks.

Ravi never asked whether I had kept the ticket. I had, folded in my purse behind the bus pass, the lotus gone soft at the creases. When the lights came up at eleven he held out his hand the way he always did before the last waltz, and in the dim between us the Om seemed to turn once, slow and certain, like something that had remembered the way home.