Back view of a person with a red mandala tattoo on the upper back and a blue line tattoo of a lotus and clouds on the left shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red mandala and blue lotus on upper back

Geometric · Back · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows the back of a person with their dark hair tied up, wearing beaded necklaces, in front of a carved wooden mask. A large red mandala with radiating geometric rings and fine detail sits centre-right on the upper back. On the left shoulder blade, a lighter blue line tattoo shows a lotus flower, a cloud motif and a small figure, drawn in thin outlines.

Geometric Botanical Back Mandala Lotus Cloud Mask Necklace

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mask had sat on the workbench since the rains began, its jaw still bare, and Made kept finding reasons not to touch it. The wood was cedar that had come down the river in a flood, and her uncle said the tree had been waiting all those years to become a demon. He had carved every face in the village for forty years and had never been wrong about wood before.

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The temple committee wanted it painted before the full moon procession, and they wanted it fierce. Made mixed the red from ground iron and rice water, the way her grandmother had shown her, and began on the cheeks. Her grandmother had always said that demons only frighten people who have forgotten how to sit still, so Made painted a small blue lotus on the forehead, where the carved brow was thickest, and then a band of cloud scrolls above it that curled like smoke from a lamp.

On the last night she drew a mandala on the floor in chalk, one ring inside another, and filled each ring with ochre until the lamplight made them look like they were turning. She sat in the middle and counted the rings the way her grandmother had counted prayers. When she looked up, the mask was facing her across the room, and it seemed to her that its painted mouth had opened a little wider than she had left it.

At dawn she left the lower lip unpainted, a pale strip of cedar, so that whatever the procession called up would have somewhere to speak from. Then she wrapped the mask in cloth and carried it down the hill, still damp, past the rice terraces where the farmers were already lifting their hats to the sun.