Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a lotus flower inside a dotted circle with small stars and a geometric triangle, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus in a dotwork circle on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with layered petals sits within a solid circle that is shaded with stippled dots, and a dotted outer ring surrounds it. Small four-point stars and dots appear around the top and sides, with a hanging geometric triangle below. The ink is black and grey, and the photograph is taken from behind so the back and shoulder area fill the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Flower Circle Star Triangle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Hettie,

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The chart is finished, though the Admiralty clerk will call it fussy. I drew every sounding as a small dot, because the ink ran thin in the heat and I did not trust a line to hold. Last night the watch called me up to the taffrail to see the stars come out over the reef, four points each, and I counted eleven before the cloud took them. Mr Okafor says a navigator who counts stars is only waiting to be wrong, but he was smiling when he said it.

We anchored in the lagoon at Mohu on Tuesday to take on water. Behind the beach there is a pond thick with water lilies, white ones and some the colour of weak tea, and they open at first light and close again by four in the afternoon. The surgeon swears it is a trick of the sun. I sat against a palm with my sketchbook and tried to draw one, but every time I got the outer petals right the inner ones came out cramped, so in the end I drew only the circle the pond made when the light struck it.

Okafor came over with a pot of tar and asked what I was wasting good paper on. I told him the circle was the one shape a man could not fudge with a straightedge, and that a lily was only a clever way of holding still in mud. He looked at the drawing for a long while and said the roots were the real anchor, and that I had drawn them without meaning to, in the dots at the bottom.

I am sending this with the sketch folded inside. Keep the dotted ring for your window and burn the rest if it smokes too badly. We sail on the morning tide. If the lilies are still open when you read this, count them for me, and I will take that as a fair wind.