Black ink and pencil shaded flash drawing of a hamsa hand with a lotus flower at its base, in a botanical neo-traditional style.

Hamsa hand with lotus flash

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of a hamsa hand with ornate mandala-style patterns across the palm and fingers, and swirling scroll motifs in the centre. A layered lotus flower sits at the base of the hand, with leaves and petals drawn in black linework. Pencil shading adds soft grey tones to the petals and palm, and the design is drawn on plain paper.

Botanical Neo-trad Hamsa Hand Lotus Mandala Swirl Petal Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been sent to count the stones of Harrowdene before the estate sells the ruin for its lead, and the woman at the lodge tells you not to bother with the chapel. You bother with it anyway. Over the postern arch someone has carved a hand, open-palmed, its fingers crowded with scrolls like ferns uncurling, and beneath it a lotus cut so deep that the rain has not yet finished filling its petals.

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The survey ledger has a column for decoration and you have never known what to write in it. The masons who cut this hand were not Border men, you think; the lotus belongs to a river you have only seen in a schoolbook. Each morning you climb the broken stair and sketch the hand on squared paper, shading the petals with the flat of your pencil, and each morning the pool in the moat has opened a little wider, pale cups floating on black water where nobody has planted anything in two hundred years.

Mrs Pell at the lodge says the hand keeps out the evil eye and the lotus is for whatever grows out of muck. She says it as though reciting a recipe. You do not argue. You count the scrolls instead: forty-one on the left palm, forty-one on the right, and one more in the centre that someone chiselled and then, you suspect, changed their mind about.

On the last afternoon the sun comes low through the arrow slit and lays the hand's shadow across the gate. You stand in the wet grass and see that the fingers are not closed as a warning but open, the way you hold a door for someone already on the step. You write one word in the decoration column, cross it out, and leave the hand where it is.