Black ink lotus mandala with a small flower and a draped dotted chain across the underbust, in botanical and dotwork style, on a woman's chest.

Lotus mandala with dotted chain on the chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large lotus flower with intricate ornamental detailing sits centrally beneath the chest, with a smaller flower above it. A fine, draped chain of dots and thin lines frames the design across the underbust. The work is done in black ink only, with crisp linework and stippled shading, and the composition is symmetrical and centred on the torso.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Lotus Flower Mandala Dotted chain Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-keeper's daughter had been sent up the pass in the last week of the thaw, with a bag of salt, a tin of lamp oil and a message her father had made her repeat three times. Tell the toll-house at the summit that the bridge at Kessen has gone. They will want to know before the snow closes the road.

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The toll-house was empty when she reached it. The stove was cold, but someone had swept the step and left a bowl of barley on the sill, still warm under a cloth. She ate standing up. Outside, the wind had found the chain that hung across the gap, the one the old keepers used to raise against wolves, and it was singing a low note that rose and fell like a woman counting under her breath.

She found the keeper in the yard, kneeling in the slush with a bucket of lamp-black and a fine brush of goat hair. He was drawing on the flagstones, a lotus the width of a cart wheel, its petals fringed with small ornaments, and beneath it a long necklace of dots that ran from stone to stone across the whole yard. Every dot was the size of a lentil and perfectly round. He did not look up. He said that the pass had been measured in dots for two hundred years, and that every traveller who crossed it left one behind, and when the chain was complete the snow would stop.

She asked how many were missing. He said that was what the lotus was for. Then he handed her the brush, and she knelt beside him and began to close the gap at the lowest point of the curve, where the chain sagged over nothing at all.