White ink lotus mandala tattoo with script in each petal and centre, sitting on the upper back of a person with pale skin.

White ink lotus mandala on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A lotus flower outline with eight petals surrounds a round centre, each filled with small curved script characters. The tattoo is done in white ink as a single line, with no shading, so it shows as a pale raised outline against the skin. The skin around it is pink and slightly inflamed, and the design is centred on the upper back with a plain background.

Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Mandala Script Petal Flower

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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

You find the lotus on the fourth-floor landing the morning after the rain, when the damp has lifted the old paint off the render. Someone drew it in white chalk years ago: eight petals around a round centre, and in every petal a small curled script that nobody on Harrow Court can read. Mrs Adebayo says it's Hindi. Mr Pryce says it's a phone number. You say nothing and fetch the bucket.

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The council's order is simple: scrub the walls, paint them magnolia, and wipe away anything that looks like graffiti. You work the brush along the petals, but the chalk has gone into the concrete the way ink goes into blotting paper, and the white only grows paler where the wet sponge passes. By noon the lotus is a ghost, a shape of raised pale lines you can feel with your thumb more than see.

Ellen from flat twelve comes out with a flask and sits on the step beside you. Her mother drew it, she says, the summer before the towers went up, when this was still a field and the pond at the bottom of Coldharbour Lane had frogs in it. The script is the names of everyone who ever lived on that corner, copied from a library book in a language nobody in the family could speak. You look at the petals and try to find a name you recognise.

You leave the outline. Magnolia can go over the colour, but not over the lines, and when the decorators come on Thursday they find the lotus still there under the paint, pale and stubborn, eight petals pushing up through the wall as if they have decided to stay. That night Ellen leaves a candle burning on the landing. You don't mention it to the council.