Close photo of a pink, orange and yellow watercolour-style sun mandala with a central spiral and paisley petals on the upper back.

Pink sun mandala on upper back

Back · Colour · Photo

A sun-like mandala sits on the upper back, with a central spiral surrounded by paisley-shaped petals and flame-like rays. The linework is soft and the shading blends pink, orange and yellow into a watercolour look. The design fills the centre of the frame against pale skin, with dark hair visible at the top edge.

Back Sun Mandala Spiral Paisley Petal Flame

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

The sun got stuck on the eleventh floor the week the lift broke, and nobody in Harrow Point believed you except Mrs Okonkwo, who kept geraniums on her balcony rail and talked to them in Igbo while she watered them. You climbed the stairs with a tin of paint from the hardware shop on Ferry Road and a brush you'd bought for skirting boards. The sun was lodged in the stairwell window, a hot orange spiral like a cinnamon bun, and around it the light had split into flame-shaped rays that curled where the bannisters threw their shadows.

Keep reading

You started with the petals, pink first, because pink was the colour the evening had been before it gave up the rest. Every flame you touched went quiet and cooled into a paisley shape on the plaster, with little seeds and loops inside them that you filled in with a fine brush and a steady hand. By the time the sky over the car park had gone the colour of a bruised peach, the landing was full of small lamps painted on the walls, and the sun, feeling lighter, rolled itself back up the shaft and out over the rooftops.

Mrs Okonkwo's geraniums turned towards it that night, all of them at once, and she stood at the rail with her watering can and laughed until a neighbour knocked on the wall. The lift still doesn't work. On clear evenings the eleventh floor glows like a kiln, and the petals on the stairwell walls fade a little each winter.

So on the first Saturday of every month you carry the tin up eleven flights, touch up the pinks, and leave the spiral alone. Nobody else in the block has the patience for the climb, and that is why the sun still stays where you left it.