Black and grey dotwork lotus tattoo with dotted ornament lines on the sternum, shown under an open white shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and dotwork tattoo on the sternum

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A woman in an open white shirt and high-waisted denim shorts shows a tattoo of a lotus flower on her chest, centred between the breasts. The lotus is built from shaded petals and fine stippled ornament, with a row of dotted lines rising above it. The image is cropped at the neck and waist, and the tattoo is in black and grey with a plain, light background.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Lotus Mandala Dotted line Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The organ's centre panel had a lotus on it, cracked along one petal where the damp had got in, and by the summer I turned sixteen I knew every shaded curl of it by heart. Dad ran the travelling fair's rides from a lorry with a sagging canvas roof, and the organ was the one thing he would not let the council scrap. "Mind the dots," he said every time I climbed the ladder with my tray of paint. Each petal was built up in brown and bronze, then stippled with a needle, thousands of tiny points that made the flower seem to open a fraction more each time you looked away.

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The dotted line above it was the hard part. Someone had ruled a faint pencil guide from the lotus's tip up to the top of the panel, then pricked a row of dots along it, one for each hour of a working day, Dad reckoned, though he had never been able to say who. I spent three weekends matching the spacing. Paraffin lamps swung in the wind off the dodgems, the canvas drummed overhead, and my hand ached in the particular way that means you are getting somewhere.

In September the buyer came from Hastings with a van and a cheque. He wanted the organ for a restaurant and said the panel would look authentic over the bar. Dad shook his hand. I asked if I could keep the old needle from the tin, rusted and bent at the point, and the buyer shrugged as if it were nothing to him.

That night I sat alone in the lorry and pricked one more row onto a scrap of card, then another, until the line ran off the edge. Dad found me at two in the morning, my fingers stained brown to the knuckle. He didn't say anything. He just held the lamp steady while I finished the row.