Black ink drawing of an ornate lotus mandala design with dotwork shading and hanging dot chains, drawn on white paper, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala tattoo design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower design drawn in black ink on white paper, with layered petals filled with fine linework, scrollwork and leaf motifs. Stippled dotwork shades the inner petals, and a central tear-drop and dot-chain border hangs below the flower. The design is shown flat and centred on the page, with a black pen partly visible in the top right corner.

Dotwork Botanical Lotus Mandala Flower Leaves Dot Drop Paisley Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lens has to be washed before the dawn shift, and you are the one who knows how, because your father's hands have started to shake over the brass. You start at the centre, where the bulb sits like a seed in a bowl of glass, and work outward ring by ring, the way he taught you when you were too small to reach the top tier without standing on the oil drum.

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Every prism has a drop hanging from its lower edge, a teardrop of cut glass that catches the grey light coming up off the water and throws it back in small coins across the gallery wall. Your father calls them the pendants. He says the men who built the thing wanted the sea to see something pretty before it saw something useful. You never asked him whether that was true. You liked the idea that the petals were made to be looked at.

The storm came in on a Tuesday in November. The Marguerite was out past the Skerry with a cargo of slate and a crew of four, and the radio had given up its last hopeful crackle an hour before dark. You climbed the iron stairs with the cloth in your teeth and the paraffin tin in your fist, and when you turned the lamp up, the light opened outward through the rings of glass like a flower in fast motion, petal after petal, the dotted brass throwing shadow lace across the lantern room.

Two hours later a flare answered from the dark, low and red. You stayed at the glass until your arms ached and the gallery rail was slick with spray, wiping each pane clean as the salt crept up it. In the morning the boat came round the point with its sail torn and its hull holding, and you saw the beam still turning, faint and steady, across the cold water. Your father was asleep in the chair. You let him sleep.