Back of a shaved head and neck with a black line lotus mandala on the scalp, a stemmed lotus design down the neck and mandala pieces across the shoulders.

Lotus mandala on scalp and neck

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bald head and upper back seen from behind, with a large black-lined lotus mandala covering the scalp. A stylised stem with drop-shaped petals runs down the neck to a rippled base, and matching ornamental mandala pieces sit on both shoulder blades. The bold outlines are filled with fine stippled dotwork on the scalp, and the composition is centred on the head against a plain grey background.

Dotwork Botanical Back Neck Shoulder Lotus Mandala Stem Petal Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Don't you stare at the water like that, boy, not with the lock gates running and the cut so high. Sit down on the coping where I can see your face. My father told me this one on the Thames stretch below Abingdon, and he had it from a lock-keeper's widow who swore every word was true, though she was a liar about the price of eels.

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There was a lock-keeper called Ada Pell who kept a pond behind her cottage, black water with a skin of weed. Her husband had drowned working the gates in a flood year, and nobody found him, so Ada reckoned the river had kept him. Every morning she went down to the pond with a bucket and a tin cup and poured the water back in, slow, the way you'd settle a child. She said the rings from the cup were the only thing the water ever gave back.

Then one June a bloom came up through the silt. It was the size of a dinner plate and folded in on itself like a fist, the petals pale at the tips and dark at the root, with ripples spreading out from its stem so neat you'd think a compass had drawn them. Barge men came to look at it. Some wept. Ada only nodded and kept pouring her cup, and the lotus kept opening a little more each day, until one morning it stood fully open and turned its face toward the lock house.

Ada died the winter after, and they say the bloom went under with her, and the pond was dredged and found nothing but a boot and a brass button. But my father swore the ripples still come up at the lock mouth on still mornings, one ring after another, and if you let your hands go slack on the tiller they will carry you through.