Black ink lotus mandala tattoo with dotwork detail centred on a woman's upper back, with dots running above and below it.

Lotus mandala on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her head turned away and one hand resting on her shoulder. A symmetrical lotus flower sits centrally on the upper back, outlined in black ink and filled with fine lines, dotwork and small repeated shapes. Two vertical lines of dots extend above and below the flower, and the plain, softly lit background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Back Lotus Flower Mandala Dot Woman Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father's drawing board is still propped against the scullery wall, its pencil lines gone the colour of weak tea. The auction men are coming on Thursday, so you sit on the back step with the board across your knees and try to recall the lotus he drew for the Pell sisters' christening cloth in the spring of 1953. Eight petals opened outwards from a centre like a boiled sweet, and beneath them ran a spine of dots, the same above as below, because he always said that without a spine the eye slides off a pattern and lands nowhere.

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Hollin Bridge had little to do in those years except mend looms and gossip about the vicar's new car. The lace-makers came to your father's kitchen on Tuesday evenings with their bobbins clicking in their aprons, and they bent over the pricked paper while he held the lamp. Mrs Ackroyd, who had the quickest fingers in the valley, complained that the lower petals were fussy. He only smiled and said the flower was meant to be looked at from the front, as if it were waiting for someone to come up the path.

The cloth was finished that October and folded into tissue paper. Nobody remarked on the dot at the very bottom of the lower line, which he had marked in pencil and never pricked. It is still there on the board, a grey speck no bigger than a lentil. You find the darning needle in the drawer where it has always lived, and you press it through the paper until it leaves a small clean hole.

The men arrive on Thursday with their van and their careful hands. You let them take the board, and when they have gone you realise you have left the lamp on in the scullery, the way he used to, so that the light falls through the new hole and makes one perfect point on the step.