Black ink tattoo of a hippo filled with mandala-style patterns, sitting on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental hippo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A hippopotamus in profile is outlined in black and filled with ornamental mandala and paisley-style motifs, including scrolls, petals and dotted details. The linework is bold and even, with the dense patterning concentrated in the body and head. The design is in black ink only and sits centrally across the upper back on plain skin.

Geometric Dotwork Back Mandala Ornament Paisley Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hippo came out of the wood on the morning the fair packed up, and nobody could say who had let it go. It stood at the edge of the bean field with water running off its flanks though it had not rained for a week. My mother said the river must have followed it, which is the sort of thing she says when she has decided not to be frightened. Dad fetched the good chisels. He had carved toys for the Hallam children for twenty years, and he reckoned a beast that size ought to be remembered properly before the constable came.

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I was the one who sat with it. Its skin was grey as wet slate and nothing like the animals in Dad's books, but the head was patient, and when I sat on the stone wall it turned one small ear towards me as if it wanted to hear the rest of what I was saying. I had a pencil and the back of a seed catalogue. I drew the outline first, and then I could not stop. Petals went into the shoulder. Scrolls ran down the legs like the bindweed on the gate. I filled the belly with dots, one for every bean my grandmother counted into the jar each winter, and the hippo let me, shifting its weight only when I reached the cheek.

When I looked up the sun had gone behind the trees and the beast had gone with it. Dad's carving sat on the bench, a plain block of lime wood with nothing on it yet. Mum said I had dreamed the whole thing. But the catalogue was in my pocket, covered in the same scrolls, and there was mud in the lane that stopped at the stile and did not go on.

I keep the drawing in my tin with the buttons. Some nights I take it out and count the dots on its belly, and I always get a different number, which Dad says is because my eyes are changing as I get older. I think the hippo is still out there adding to it, one petal at a time, somewhere past the stile where the wood begins and the village ends.