Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo centred on the upper back, with a Sri Yantra geometric design inside a circle surrounded by petal shapes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sri Yantra mandala on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala tattoo sits centrally on the upper back. Its inner circle holds a Sri Yantra made of interlocking triangles, surrounded by an outer ring of pointed petals and circular motifs. The shading is built from fine dots and clean black outlines in grey and black ink, with the design filling most of the frame against smooth skin.

Dotwork Geometric Back Mandala Triangle Petal Circle

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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

Sit closer, the stove is only so warm, and turn the lamp down before I start, because the old tales do not care for too much light. My grandmother's barge was the Tern, and she carried coal up the Oxford canal when there was coal to carry. Every winter she sat at the tiller and drew the same shape in the condensation on the window, a ring of points with nine triangles folded inside each other like a dropped star.

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The summer I was eleven, a man came aboard at Banbury lock with a sack of brass fittings and a bad cough. He said he was a sign-painter the printers had put out of work. He wanted passage to Brentford, and he offered to paint a sun on the cabin doors in payment. My grandmother said no. He painted it anyway, at night, while she slept: pointed petals and round moons set around a small knot of triangles, all done in dots so fine you had to lean in close to see the hand that made them.

In the morning the sun looked wet, as if it had only just come up out of the cut. At Hillmorton the lockkeeper stopped to stare at it, and the water began to lift against the hull though no rain had fallen for a week. My grandmother scrubbed the doors with turpentine until her knuckles bled, and the dots would not shift. The man was gone by Hillmorton, and so was the brass.

She never painted over it. Forty years later, when the Tern was broken up, the doors went to a chapel at Brentford, and the sun is still there, turning its petals towards anyone who comes in out of the rain looking for the way back to the water. Now finish your tea, and mind the lamp.