Black and grey yin yang symbol set within a shaded lotus mandala tattoo on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin yang inside a lotus mandala on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A yin yang symbol sits at the centre of a circular mandala of layered lotus petals. The petals are shaded with soft grey gradients and fine outlines, while the black half of the symbol has a stippled, textured finish. The image is in black and grey, framed closely on freckled skin across the upper back.

Back Yin yang Lotus Mandala Petal Symbol

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had come early to the Kharpa Pass, and Ama Lhakpa was still half a mile below the cairn when the mule stopped dead and refused to take another step. Its load had shifted. Wrapped in sacking and lashed across the packsaddle was the roundel Dorje had promised the shrine before the passes closed, a disc of black slate on one side and pale marble on the other, each as wide as a bread tin.

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She unwrapped it on a flat rock while the wind tugged at her hood. Dorje had cut sixteen petals around each face, every one shaded from ash to charcoal so the lotus seemed to open as the light moved over it. He had sunk the two halves of the symbol into the centre, one tongue of white curling into the dark and one tongue of black curling into the pale. But the small eye in the black half was still bare. His letter, which had reached the valley house three weeks earlier, said only: take it up yourself, the stone wants to be finished where it will sit.

Pemba the keeper came out of the shrine when he heard her swearing at the mule. He was a small man with a face like weathered leather, and he studied the roundel for a long time without speaking. Then he took a pinch of pale grit from his sleeve, where he kept it for the lamps, and pressed it into the hollow with his thumb. Ama held the slate steady while he worked. The grit settled. The black eye sat in the white, and the white eye sat in the black, and the whole lotus seemed to breathe out.

They set the roundel into the wall above the door before the light failed. Ama stayed outside after Pemba had gone in to bank the fire. The snow had stopped. She laid her palm on the cold slate, and beneath the petals she could feel the two halves turning slowly around their one small point, as though they had never once been apart.