Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala design with dotwork shading

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus-style mandala design drawn in black fineliner on white paper. A central oval gem sits within a pointed bloom, with curled leaves above and scrolling tendrils extending to each side. The lower petals are filled with stippled dotwork shading, while the outlines and upper petals are left as clean single lines.

Dotwork Geometric Lotus Mandala Gem Leaves Tendril Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Third night running the lamp at the corner of Ferrier Street has gone dark by twenty past two, and third night running I have sat under the drawing-office bulb with the circle template and the 0.1 pen, putting it back on the survey sheet. Mr Okonedo says the council will not pay to replace what it cannot find on paper, so paper is where I must keep it. I start at the centre, always at the centre, with the little oval I call the gem, a window of hatched lines that never quite closes.

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Outward from there the petals open the way the lotus did in the newsreels my father used to show us, each one ruled true against the cut-out ovals of the template, then filled with dots, hundreds of them, because dots are how the setts of the street look at night when the rain has got into the joints. Nobody reads the dots. They read the outline, the clean single line that tells the eye where a thing stops. I have learned that the outline is the only part of any plan that anybody trusts.

Last night I drew the tendrils out past the edge of the sheet and found the lamp again, not where the map said but three doors down, behind a hoarding, a lamp nobody had lit since the trams stopped running. Its glass was whole. Someone had painted a small blue stone above the door, the same shape as my gem, and beneath it, in chalk gone grey, a single word: here.

I have not told Mr Okonedo. I have added the lamp to the sheet in fine black, petal by petal, and left the dots off, because some things a city should only be shown once it is ready to look. Tomorrow I will fold the sheet into my coat, walk over at two in the morning and stand under the hoarding, and see whether the light comes on for me.