Dotwork mandala tattoo on chest

The abbot has finally let me take the pricking wheel to the cloister wall, though he says it must be done before the Feast of Saint Brendan or not at all. You will laugh, because I told you once that dots were for children and beggars. Old Brother Osric proved me wrong this week. He stood me in front of the chapter-house door with a lantern and made me count the dots in his drawing, all four thousand and some, each one placed by hand with a quill tip, no ruling, no compass. He said a mandala is not a picture but a way of walking with the eye from the centre outward.

The centre is a sunflower, though we have no sunflowers here. Osric says the Lady's brother brought the seed from the south, and the monks grew it for the bees. Beneath it the lotus opens its petals in a half-moon, each petal stippled darker at the root so it seems to lift from the wall. He had me shade the lowest petal three times over, dot upon dot, until my wrist cramped and the ink sat like a bruise on the paper. "Depth is only patience showing," he said.

Last night the lamp guttered out before I finished. I sat in the dark and kept placing dots by feel, guided by the faint ridges of the pricked pattern. When dawn came grey through the slit window, I saw that my final row had landed exactly on the old man's mark, as if our hands had been working the same circle from opposite sides.

He died at Compline. The abbot has asked me to finish the rest alone. I am writing this with the brush in my other hand, so forgive the blots.

Yours in the dust of pounce, Anselm