Black and grey lotus mandala tattoo with dotwork shading on the upper back, with hands pressed together in prayer below it.

Lotus mandala tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey lotus mandala sits centrally on a bare upper back, with layered petals, a central teardrop and a vertical line of dots extending above and below the motif. The design combines fine linework with stippled dotwork and solid shading in the petals and centre. The hands pressed together at the lower back balance the composition against the soft greyscale skin tones.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Back Lotus Mandala Dot Hand Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Annick kept the lamp at the ford for forty winters and never lit it before the bell. She said the river remembered who was late. When her son Tobin came back from the salt boats with a bad knee and no wish to sit still, he took to drawing on the flagstones of the chapel porch with a nail and a pot of wood ash.

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He drew a flower first, a lotus with petals laid over one another like the prows of small boats. Above it and below it he set a line of dots, because his mother had told him the dots were the days still to come and the days already gone, and a person ought to keep both in view. Every evening after supper he added one more. The vicar complained that the porch looked like a ledger. The river didn't complain at all.

By the first week of August the dots reached the bottom step, and the lamp at the ford stayed dark for the first time in forty years. Annick walked down to the bank with her shawl pulled tight and found the water already still and wide where the reeds had been. She said nothing about the lamp. She only pointed at the mud.

In the morning there was a lotus standing up out of the pond, white at the tip and grey at the root, and a line of dots running from its petals down into the water as if someone had counted them out in the night.