Black and grey ornamental tattoo across the upper back and nape, with a rose on the shoulder, photographed from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental back piece with rose on shoulder

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper back is shown from behind, with her head turned away and hair pulled up. A large ornamental design sits across the upper back and nape, built from symmetrical paisley and mandala-like motifs, bands of stripes and a central floral medallion. A rose with bold outlines and soft shading sits on the shoulder, and the ornament is rendered in fine black linework with grey shading.

Geometric Botanical Back Neck Shoulder Mandala Paisley Ornament Rose Floral Lace pattern Stripe

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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

Mr Garrow never let us take the drawings home, so I learned the mandala by heart on the bus to Kilmarnock, tracing it on the steamed glass with my thumb. Eleven rings of it, he'd told us, each one a shawl's worth of patience. The centre was a flower with its petals opened like a hand, and I could not stop thinking about how a hand like that would look on a shawl folded over someone's shoulders.

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We punched the cards in the long room above the dye vats, where the air tasted of alum and wet wool. My job was the stripes, the little teeth of holes that told the loom when to lift a thread. Nobody checked my spacing at the edges because nobody wanted the edges. I kept a sheet of spare card in my apron pocket and, one night after the whistle, I drew the central medallion in pencil, then pricked it through, hole by hole, until the pattern was mine.

In March the loom-tuner took the card home to his wife, who swore she'd never seen such a close border. It went out in the autumn range under the name of a man in Glasgow who had never held a punch. I did not complain. I went down to the dye house instead and bought one brown shawl with my spare wages, and when the frost came I wore it with the border turned high, so the flower sat near my collar and the rose-shaped swirl at the corner caught the lamplight on the walk home, and nobody thought to ask who had drawn it.