Large ornamental back tattoo with symmetrical paisley, scrollwork and a small red lotus at the centre, shown across the middle of the back in a botanical and geometric style.

Ornate mandala back tattoo

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large symmetrical design covers the middle and upper back, built from paisley shapes, scrolling filigree, floral motifs and a central circular panel. A small red lotus sits at the centre, while the rest of the linework and shading is in black and grey. The photograph is taken from behind against a dark background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Botanical Geometric Back Mandala Lotus Paisley Flower Scrollwork Ornament Symmetrical design

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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 Queen's silversmith has finished the last panel of the Mirror Hall, and she sends for you before the lamps are lit. You arrive with ink on your cuffs and a bundle of sketches under your arm, every one of them mirrored so exactly that a man could fold the page in half and find the same vine on both sides. She does not look at the drawings. She looks at your hands.

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The commission is a ceiling for the Lotus Pavilion, and she wants it to answer a question nobody in Vashmoor has been able to settle: where the eye should rest. You tell her the eye rests where the rings meet, at a red bloom in the centre that the scrolls keep returning to, the way a tongue keeps returning to a broken tooth. You have spent three winters learning to make paisley curl the way river water turns in a bend, and she knows it. She asks you to make the centre red. You tell her red takes the longest to dry.

Sixteen months later the pavilion is finished and the Queen is dead, and the new steward climbs the scaffold to check the ceiling for flaws. He finds none. He finds only that every filigree leaf has been cut so the shadow falls the same way on each side, and that the single red bloom has been laid with a pigment bought from a dye-house that closed the year you were born. He calls up to ask why you did not paint it brighter. You tell him the light only needs to find it once.