Black dotwork and blackwork mandala tattoo with a central lotus motif, spanning the upper back and nape of the neck.

Ornamental mandala tattoo across upper back and neck

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is shown from behind, with a large ornamental tattoo covering the nape of her neck and upper back. The central motif is a lotus-like flower with layered petals, framed by scrolling floral panels, fern-like sprigs and dotted pendant lines. The design is built from fine stippled dots, solid black fills and clean outlines, in black ink only, and is centred on the spine.

Dotwork Blackwork Back Neck Mandala Lotus Ornament Floral Dotted line Fern Scroll

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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

Sit closer, the wind wants the door. You want the road story or the lamp story? Good, the lamp story, because the road only ever gives you one of those.

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My grandfather worked tin in the old town at the foot of the escarpment. He did not draw his patterns. He pricked them, one dot at a time, with a nail he had sharpened on a whetstone older than him. A lotus with six petals, each petal ringed with dots so fine you needed the lamp to see them. Under the lamp, the dots threw small stars across the wall. Below the flower he hung a fringe of dotted lines, like water falling off a well rope.

The year the great dust came, a salt merchant named Yusuf Haddad, who was not a good man but was a stubborn one, drove out past the last well with his brother's coffin in the back of the truck. Nobody sensible drives at night in dust. He did. He saw a light, low and gold, scattering its stars across the sand, and he followed it up the wadi until his tyres found gravel instead of drift.

The lamp hung in the window of my grandfather's shop, where he had left it burning because his wife had not come home from the market. She came home at dawn. The lamp had not gone out. Yusuf sold that truck the next spring and never drove that road again. The lamp is on the wall behind me. Count the dots if you do not believe me. My grandfather always said there were exactly as many as the nights he waited.