Black ink drawing of a kookaburra head above a dotwork mandala and botanical flower, a tattoo design in a black and grey dotwork and botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kookaburra and mandala flower design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a kookaburra's head and shoulder rising above a large flower with a dotted centre, leaves and a layered mandala motif. The bird's feathers and eye are drawn with fine hatched linework, while the mandala petals and flower centre use stippled dots. The design is in black ink on white paper and is centred on the sheet.

Dotwork Botanical Bird Flower Leaves Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had found the gap in my tarpaulin again, so the paperbacks at the front of the stall were swelling like bread, and I was trying to save the Penguin crime novels by stacking them on the tea crate when the laughing started. It came from across the aisle, a rough, rolling chuckle that rose and broke and rose again, the sort of noise you would expect from a man who had told a joke he was pleased with.

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It was Dev, of course, who ran the flower stall between the fishmonger and the man selling phone cases. He had a tinny speaker tucked behind his buckets of tulips and he played that kookaburra call on a loop whenever the weather turned, because, he told me once, the birds in Queensland laugh before the storms and he liked to be early. His buckets were ringed with paper cones, and in the wet his best arrangements, the ones he built into rounds like little mandalas, had gone dark at the edges where the water sat on the petals.

I went over with my hood up and bought the last bunch he had, yellow chrysanthemums tied with string. He wiped his hands on his apron, looked at the sky, and said the rain was good for the worms, which was good for the birds, which was good for the whole market if you thought about it long enough. I told him I had been thinking about it long enough already, and he laughed, the same rolling laugh from the speaker, so I could not tell which of them had started it.

On the walk back to the bus stop the wet paper clung to the flowers and the string dug into my fingers. Somewhere behind me the recording started up again, and I found myself smiling at the pavement, as if the joke had finally been explained to me and it was a good one.