Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo on the chest between the breasts, with fan-shaped ornaments above and a teardrop point below.

Lotus mandala on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large lotus flower sits at the centre of a symmetrical mandala-style design, with a tiered fan ornament rising above it and a teardrop point below. The petals and ornamental panels are built from fine outlines filled with dense dotwork stippling that creates soft shading. The design is entirely black and grey and spreads wide across the chest, with two hands with black nails resting on the skin at the upper edges of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Lotus Mandala Flower Ornament Fan Teardrop Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The plate-maker's widow pricked her first dot into the water-gate of Saltmarsh Lane on a night when the river was higher than anyone had seen it. Her husband had gone under at that same sluice the winter before, and the council wanted the iron sealed and painted over. Instead Mrs Orla Venn sat on an upturned crate with a sewing needle, a jar of lamp black and a lantern hung from the railing, and she stippled the metal one dot at a time.

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Tobias Reed, who trimmed the lamps along the quay, stopped to watch her most nights. The petals came first, a great flower opening outward from a small dotted heart, then the scalloped panels that spread either side like the wings of a moth that had decided against flying. Above it she built a little tiered fan and a spiral of curls. Below, she finished with a single teardrop. Tobias asked her what it was for. She said the river liked a thing that was finished, and that she meant to give it one.

The flood came in January, black and quick, and the water reached the top rail of the quay. Tobias went along the lamps with his pole, lighting each wick by hand, and when he reached the gate he saw the water lapping at the lowest petal and holding there, as if it had come up against a rim it had been taught to respect. The gate stayed shut. The river did not come through.

In spring the teardrop was always wet in the morning, though the iron had been dry at dusk. Mrs Venn had stopped coming out, and Tobias kept the lamp by the gate turned up a little higher than the others, so that anyone walking home along the water could see the flower and know where the step was.