Black and grey ornamental design of mandalas, paisley and flowers running down the centre of a person's back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala column down the spine

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back in a black and white photograph shows a vertical column of ornamental motifs running along the spine, including mandala-like rosettes, a paisley shape and floral forms. The lines are fine and dense with some dotted fills, and the design is rendered in dark ink without colour. The composition is centred on the spine with patterned trousers at the waist and bed linen around the edges. The photo does not confirm whether the design is tattoo ink or henna.

Back Mandala Paisley Flower Spine Ornament Column

Find an artist for this

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

Sit closer, the fire's low and my voice is older than the hall. Back in the year the Palais on Harrow Road burned its first chandelier, there was a woman called Mirela who taught the girls to dance the foxtrot in boots that pinched. She had a column of little brass charms sewn down her cardigan for luck, one for each dance she had won, and when she was tired she would press them with her thumb the way a priest tells beads. The ladies whispered she'd been painted by a gypsy in Lisbon. That was nonsense. Her mother had done the marks on her, with a paste of ground leaves and a stick, the night before Mirela sailed.

Keep reading

Now the Palais had a new manager, a Mr Okafor who ran the ballroom like a railway timetable, and he did not care for her cardigan or her stories. He wanted the floor cleared by eleven. So one Thursday, when the band struck up and every couple turned, Mirela stood still in the middle of the boards and began to unbutton. The girls gasped. Mr Okafor went red to the collar. But she only turned her back to the room and lifted her chin, and there it was, a column of rosettes and paisley and flowers running from her shoulders to the belt of her skirt, dark and fine as lace. Nobody had ever seen that much of her skin, and nobody had ever seen so much pattern on it.

He did not clear the floor that night. He went quiet and asked her to show him the next step, and she did, and the band played on past eleven. The next morning a single brass charm lay on the boards by the door, the first one she had ever given away. Mr Okafor kept it in his waistcoat pocket for the rest of his life, and some say it still turns the lock of the Palais on a Thursday, when the floor is empty and the dancing begins.