Black ink sketch of a lotus flower with dotted chain lines running down the page, a fine line and dotwork tattoo design drawn on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and chain flash design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on white paper shows a detailed lotus flower at the centre, with layered petals and fine interior hatching. Thin dotted chains hang from the flower and curve down the sheet, with small dots marking the ends of each link. The linework is dark and even, and the design is entirely black ink with no colour or shading beyond the pen strokes.

Botanical Fine line Dotwork Lotus Flower Chain Dot Mandala Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You finish the flower at a quarter past two, when the radiators in the print room have gone cold and the only sound is the tram bell sliding up Linnet Street. The lotus sits at the centre of the sheet, every petal hatched twice so the light can't settle on it. Its chains are still wet at the ends where you haven't yet placed the last dots.

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Mrs Okonedo, who runs the shop downstairs and has never once asked what you're drawing, has left a tin of shortbread on the stool with a note that says only "for the flash wall, not for you." You have been drawing for that wall for eleven years. Nobody has ever climbed the stairs asking for a lotus with chains. They ask for swallows, for dates, for a dead dog's name in copperplate.

So you pick up the pen and follow the chain down the paper, dot by dot, past the edge of the sheet and across the desk, over the lamp, down the side of the table and onto the floor where the streetlight comes through the blinds in bars. Each dot is a lamp post. Each link is a block you walked home that winter, counting under your breath so the cold wouldn't get in.

By dawn the chain runs off the page entirely and the flower is only a flower again, pinned to the wall beside the swallows. You notice you have drawn the last dot where your own front door should be, and you leave it unfinished, the pen hovering a single breath above the paper.