Black and grey geometric lotus tattoo with stippled dotwork shading across the centre of the chest.

Geometric lotus with dotwork shading on chest

Geometric · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a symmetrical lotus-like form made of overlapping pointed petals in a single bold black outline, with interlocking arcs forming a star-shaped centre. Below and around the outline, dense stippled dots create a shaded, mandala-like halo. The photograph is black and grey, taken straight on, with dark fabric visible at the upper corners of the frame.

Geometric Dotwork Chest Lotus Mandala Petal Star Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had left the outer ledges ticking and wet when Imke Vaarn set down her dividers and counted the petals again. Six. Always six, the same six her grandfather had inked onto the Skerrow survey in 1911, each one a pointed lens of rock rising from the low-water flats and curling back on itself before it met the next. Where the arcs crossed, the currents turned in a small knot the fishermen called the heart, and nobody fished it.

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She had come out to the island to finish the copying, not to find anything. The chart lay under a jar of wrack on the kitchen table, its ink gone the brown of weak tea. Around the outer edge someone had pricked a fine halo of dots where the spray reached on a north wind, and the dots had been counted too, nine hundred and twelve of them, in a neat column in the margin. At the top of the page her grandfather had written the number seven. Seven arcs, and only six drawn.

She found the seventh at dusk, where it should have crossed the bay: a flat grey stone sunk in the sand, its edge worn into the exact curve of a petal. She knelt and laid the brass dividers on it. One point sat on the stone, the other on the heart of the knot, and the span matched the margin to the hair. Behind her the sea came in across the flats, filling each lens in turn, until only the centre stayed dry.

She waited there until the water reached her knees, reading the petals by the last light, and understood that the chart had never been a map of the bay at all. It was a drawing of where to stand when the sea came back.