Fine line botanical tattoo of flowers, leaves and swirls with dotwork shading on the outer thigh.

Floral mandala tattoo on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of two flower heads, a dotted mandala-style bloom, leaves and curling tendrils runs up the outer thigh. The linework is fine and even, with stippled dots shading the petals of the lower bloom. The bare thigh fills the frame, and a hand holding a blue mug sits in the lower left.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Thigh Flower Mandala Leaves Swirl Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sea took three boats from Hollin Point the winter Maud Teague's father stopped coming up the stairs, so she took the lamp and her pen instead. Every night before the wick was trimmed she drew on the cold whitewash beside the glass, one flower head at a time, with leaves that looped and tendrils that curled down the wall towards the stairwell. She did the lower bloom in dots, a dot for each hour the men had been out, and she worked the middle until her wrist ached.

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Nobody in the village believed the drawings did anything. Her mother called it idle hands. But the autumn gales came and went, the boats that passed the point came home, and the fishermen began leaving bread on the lamp-room step for her.

The turn came in March, when fog sat on the water for six days. A coble came round the point by the light of a flower nobody had lit, its bow catching on a rock where a bloom had opened in the sea-thrift overnight, stippled in pink and grey, following the line Maud had drawn. The crew took it for a sign and steered by it.

Maud kept the lamp another forty years. On the last night she lifted her cold tea, found the pen dry, and finished the final petal with her thumb pressed to the wall, leaving a dot that still shows where the paint has faded.