Black and grey geometric tattoo on a forearm showing a four-petal lotus shape around a downward triangle inside a circle, set within a square outline.

Geometric lotus and triangle on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black outline forms a square, with a four-petal lotus-like shape set diagonally inside it. At the centre, a solid downward-pointing triangle sits within a circle, with the petals filled in solid black and some areas shaded with stippled dots. The design is in black ink only and is centred on the inner forearm against a plain skin background.

Geometric Blackwork Forearm Lotus Triangle Circle Square Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The square was pegged out before the frost, string drawn taut between four oak stakes, and my grandfather would not let me touch the line until he had walked both diagonals twice. Forty-one paces a side, he said. Not forty, not forty-two. The lotus would sit turned on its corner inside it, like a kite caught in a hedge, and every petal would need its own bed of thyme so the bees could find their way in.

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We dug the four beds in March. The soil at the north corner was clay the colour of wet slate, and it came off the spade in plates. He laid out the triangle himself, point toward the kitchen door, because he said a thing that points down is taking something in, and the house had been taking things in for a hundred years. In the middle of the triangle he set a round river stone, grey and smooth, and told me to keep the gravel around it raked and never walked on.

The summer he went into hospital I kept the raking. I kept the thyme cut back and the square edged with a half-inch trowel. Nobody asked me to, and by August I was the only person who knew why the water from the gutters ran in a neat dark line along the outer edge of the square and pooled, every time, inside the lowest petal and nowhere else.

When the drain man came he dug where I showed him, below the stone, and found a clay pipe laid by hand, its joints lined up on the same diagonal as the petals. He said nobody builds a drain like that by accident. I thought of the string, of forty-one paces, and of my grandfather's palm flat on the soil. I left the stone where it sat and let the rain find its own way down.