Black and grey dotwork tattoo design of a lotus flower with an om symbol at its centre, leaves on either side and dots running vertically above and below.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and om symbol design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design of a lotus flower with pointed petals and layered leaves, with an om symbol inside a shield-like shape at the centre. Fine stippled dotwork and thin lines shade the petals and leaves, with decorative scrollwork and dots forming a mandala-style border. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain white background and is centred with a vertical line of dots.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Lotus Om symbol Mandala Leaves Dot Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

14 March. Eleven umbrellas, four left gloves and a tin of mint imperials that rattled like a loose bolt. The tin is the only thing I cannot shelve. Someone scratched a ring of tiny dots around its lid, then loops like a curling fern, and at the centre a lotus with its petals folding down to a point, a shield-shaped cradle at its heart and a curled symbol inside it like a sleeping figure three. Mrs Okafor from the ticket hall says it is the sound the world makes, older than the railway. I told her it looked like a pudding. She told me to look again.

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21 March. Still unclaimed. I have started a habit: each morning before the 6.40 pulls out I set a dot in the margin of the ledger, one beneath another, down the page like a plumb line. Thomas on platform two asks what I am counting. I tell him the days the tin has waited. He says it has nothing to wait for, it is only sweets. Yesterday the loudspeaker announced the 6.40 was cancelled, and the concourse went so still I could hear the kettle in the signal box.

2 April. A woman came in with her collar up and asked for a tin with a flower on it. She could not say what colour the flower had been. She said the tin once held her father's sewing thread, then his pipe tobacco, then nothing at all, and she had wanted something to keep empty on purpose. I passed it across. She turned it over, pressed the lid with her thumb and laughed, a short sound that bounced off the tiles. "It still has the dots," she said. "I thought he would have scraped them off."

She left it with me and asked me to keep it. So it goes on the top shelf, where the clock light finds it at four, and I add one more dot to the margin.