Black and grey dotwork and fine line drawing of a symmetrical geometric lotus ornament with a vertical stem, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Geometric lotus-style ornament design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design of a stylised lotus or ornamental bloom, with pointed petals, a central diamond and a long vertical stem running up and down. Fine single lines form the outlines, while stippled dotwork shades the petals and gives them depth. The design is drawn in black on a plain off-white background, with small dotted arcs and tapering spikes extending outwards from the centre.

Dotwork Geometric Fine line Lotus Ornament Mandala Diamond Petal Stem Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been trimming the saloon lamp every evening since the Cape, because nobody else aboard the Marigold Ann will climb the shrouds with an oil can in a Southerly. The lamp is brass and glass, shaped like a closed flower and hung on a long iron rod from the deckhead, its chimney flaring at the foot into six petals. Salt gets into the fine stipple of the glass, and you can only lift it with a damp rag folded into a point. The captain's wife says it looks like frost, even in the tropics.

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Off the Horn the sea came green over the bulwarks for three days, and the third petal cracked clean through. You had nothing to replace it with but a sherry bottle the steward had kept back, so you spent a whole watch on your knees with a file and a bucket, wrapping the cut edge in twine so it would not take a finger. Harrow watched from the galley door and said nothing, which from Harrow amounted to kindness. When the lamp went up again, the new petal was greener than the rest, and the second mate called it the Dutch one. That is still what it is called.

In the Roaring Forties a boy named Tobias Quill went over the side while reefing the foretopsail. Nobody saw him go. The watch kept looking up at the lamp, swinging in the empty saloon, and the captain ordered it lit every night all the way to Shanghai, though the oil cost more than the boy's wages. You did not argue. You filled it yourself.

On the last morning, with the pilot boat coming out through the mist off the Woosung bar, you pinched the wick and watched the thin smoke climb the stem. The sun came through the chimney and threw the salt marks across the table in hundreds of small points of light, scattered like a sky nobody else on board had thought to look for.