Black ornamental mandala tattoo running down the upper back from the nape, seen on a woman with her hair up and wearing a grey top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala tattoo on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind with her hair tied up, showing a large symmetrical tattoo that starts at the nape and extends down the upper back between the shoulder blades. The design is a dense mandala-like motif built from layered floral and scroll-like shapes in black linework and fill. The tattoo is the only colour in an otherwise neutral image, with a grey top and a plain pale background.

Back Mandala Ornament Filigree Floral motif

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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

The lion stopped eating on Tuesdays, and by October the ringmaster had started counting the empty seats instead of selling them. You sit in the wardrobe wagon with a needle between your teeth, finishing the lining of his coat. The gold thread is the last of a reel bought in Leeds, and you have been stitching the same flower for three weeks, a bloom that opens from a centre button in eight layered petals, then scrolls, then petals again, each half a mirror of the other.

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Nobody sees the lining. Gareth says so every time he comes in for a cup of tea, standing in the doorway with his hat in his hands like a man at a funeral. You tell him you see it. You tell him the trick is that it only works if both sides come out the same, and he laughs, because he knows you have never once got a fold of it wrong.

On the last night there are eleven people in the tent and a dog that belongs to the man who sells the popcorn. The trapeze is rigged but nobody flies. Gareth goes out in the coat anyway, and in the spill from the single working spotlight the gold scrolls wake up on the inside of the black wool, flashing each time he lifts his arms.

Afterwards you fold the coat with the lining facing in, the way you were taught, so that the pattern goes into the van unbroken and nobody on the road will ever know it was there.