Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a sea urchin surrounded by radiating shells and flowers across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sea urchin and shell mandala on a back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A central sea urchin is surrounded by eight spiral shells and sprigs of small five-petalled flowers arranged in a symmetrical, sunburst-like design. The linework is built from fine stippled dots, giving the urchin and shells a textured, shaded look. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills the frame of a bare back, with the design centred.

Dotwork Botanical Back Shell Flower Sprig Mandala Sunburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the stones on the slope, love, they're loose after the rain. Sit yourself down on that upturned bucket and I'll tell you how the sun came down to Hollin Pit, because my grandmother told it to me the same way and her mother before her. The men who worked the seam below the chapel had a rule that no one spoke of the sea, for the sea was a hundred miles off and a man could forget the taste of salt if he thought on it too long. But Tamsin Ogle, who kept the bakehouse by the level crossing, kept a jar on her sill full of spiky shells her brother had sent from Cornwall, and every morning she set the jar in the window so the coal dust would not settle on the glass.

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One February the pit flooded at the third level and the men were brought up grey as ash, and the lamp boys said the water had come up through the floor like a held breath let go. Tamsin took the jar down that night and carried it to the top of the spoil heap. She poured the shells out onto the frozen black earth and they rattled like teeth. Then, because she had nothing else to give, she stood in the wind and counted them, one spiral for each of the eight men still missing, and set them round a stone she had brought up from the bakehouse hearth, a round grey stone pricked all over with holes.

In the spring the lichen came up through the spoil in rings, and then the sprigs of little pink flowers, five petals each, though nobody had planted a thing. The stone was still there in April. The men were not. But on the morning the last of the water was pumped out, Tamsin's brother walked up from the station with a sack on his back, and when he opened it there was a sea urchin inside, dry and spined, that he had carried the whole way from Penzance to bring her home. She laid it at the centre of the ring, and the sun came over the chapel roof and lit every one of those shells, and that, love, is why the old women of Hollin still say the sun rises from the stone.