Black and grey dotwork lotus flower with a mandala above and a dotted triangle below, tattooed across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and mandala on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower in shaded dotwork sits at the centre of the design, with a layered mandala-style ornament rising behind it. A dotted triangle with hanging drop shapes and a dotted arc forms the base. The tattoo is rendered in black and grey tones, with the composition centred on the upper back.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Mandala Triangle Dot Drop Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fountain had been dry since the spring of 1974, and Mr Okonedo from the parks office rang me on a Tuesday to say the council wanted it working before the August fête. I told him I would need a month and a stencil of whatever lay under forty years of green paint. He sent a photograph of a rusted iron rosette, the size of a dinner plate, and I knew at once that someone had once cared about it.

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The rosette was a lotus, opened over a ring of petals, with a mandala of pointed leaves climbing behind it like a crown. Beneath, the basin rim had been cast in a triangle with little hanging drops moulded along its edge. I spent three evenings with a magnifier and a tin of wire brushes, lifting paint off the petals one dot at a time, because the maker had stippled the shading rather than cutting it. Each dot was a tiny hammer blow. Nobody works like that now.

On the fourth day a boy from the flats came to watch through the railings. He asked whether the flower was real. I said it had been real once, in a pond somewhere, and somebody had decided iron would last longer. He counted the drops on the triangle and got to forty-one before losing his place.

When we turned the water on in August the basin filled slowly from the centre outwards, and the lotus threw its first thin arc of spray. The boy stood under it with his arms out. I wrote the number forty-one on the back of my invoice, in case anyone asked me later how many drops there were. The council never did.