Black and grey ornate lotus tattoo in dotwork and fine line detail, centred on a woman's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lotus on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus flower with layered petals fills the centre of the upper back, with a small dot above and below the central bloom. The petals and base are built from fine linework and stippled dots, with patterned filling that gives an ornamental, mandala-like effect. The ink is black and grey, and the tattoo sits centrally against plain skin with dark blurred lettering in the background.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Flower Mandala Ornament Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The block had to be cut to the same depth on both sides or the cloth came off the press lopsided, and my aunt Ruth never let a lopsided sheet leave the island. She sat me at the bench in February, when the ferry ran only twice a week and the gulls had given up on the harbour, and handed me a pear-wood slab with a lotus already drawn on it in pencil.

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I worked three weeks on the petals. The outer ones were easy, long and plain like the fins of a fish. The inner ones were the trouble: every line had to be a hair finer than the last, and the stippling had to be done with the tip of a nail set, tap, tap, tap, until my shoulders ached and the dust had settled into every crease of my knuckles. Ruth came past each evening, held the block up to the lamp, and said nothing at all, which from her was praise.

On the last night the storm took the power, so I finished by candle. When I stepped back the lotus looked almost too quiet, a centred thing with its rings of petals folded around a seed. I added the two small dots, one above the bloom and one below, the way she had taught me to mark the top and foot of every block so the printer never lost the pattern's way. Then I pressed a sheet of cloth down and lifted it, and the flower came up perfect, indigo on cream.

Ruth looked at it a long time. Then she turned the cloth over, ran her thumb along the back where the ink had bled through, and said, 'Now you can print it crooked on purpose if you like.' I have never done that. I still cut the dots first, before anything else, so that whatever else goes wrong I always know where the centre is.