Black linework tattoo of an ornamental mandala with lotus flowers across a person's upper and lower back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala and lotus back tattoo

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large black ornamental design fills the back, with a symmetrical mandala-like pattern of scrolls, arches and pointed motifs rising from the shoulders towards the centre. Lotus-like flower shapes sit at the lower back, drawn in fine, even outlines with little or no shading. The ink is solid black on a bare back photographed from behind in a bright, indoor room.

Geometric Botanical Back Mandala Lotus Ornament Floral Pattern Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pring had folded the same square of tracing paper eleven times before Tom came in from the yard with rain on his collar. "It's wrong," she said, without looking up. "The left arm sits a hair heavier than the right, and a mistake like that will live in the tiles for good."

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The Ashworth Tile Works had sent for her in March, when the new chapel at Holme Cross wanted a floor that would make visitors stop in the doorway. The pattern had to turn on itself from the outside inwards: scrolls like bent wire, arches climbing to a single point, and at the bottom a pair of lotus heads opening towards the threshold. Tom held the lamp while she ran a bone folder along the crease, and he counted the petals under his breath as she went.

"Why a lotus in a chapel?" he asked. "Because it comes up out of the mud and is clean," she said. "Nobody argues with a flower that has already done the hard part." She unfolded the sheet again. Both halves matched except for one scroll near the top, which she corrected with a single stroke of pencil and a long breath through her nose.

On Saturday the floor went down in a cold grey light. Tom knelt at the far end, where the sun came through the high window and laid its colour across the black. Ada stood by the door with her coat buttoned to the chin, and when the first family came in, they stopped exactly where she had known they would and looked down at the centre of the room, as though something had been waiting there for them all along.