Black and grey lotus mandala tattoo with dotwork and hanging drops on the side of the ribs.

Lotus mandala with hanging drops on the side

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with a layered, ornamental mandala centre hangs a set of chains and drop shapes below it. Fine black linework is combined with shading and small dots on the petals. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against warm skin, with a teal top and dark trousers at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Lotus Mandala Flower Chain Drop Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lantern-maker's daughter in Harrowgate Lane had a lotus of her own making, drawn in soot and oil on the inside of her wrist, and nobody in the dance hall ever saw it because she wore her sleeves long. Her name was Orla Venn and she swept the hall floor each night after the fiddlers packed up, counting the dropped buttons into a tin.

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One winter a stranger came in off the frost with a box of brass chains and a trunk of paper flowers. He said he had walked from a country where the lotus opens on still water every morning, and that the petals hold the day's first light until noon. He sold a chain to every girl who asked, and when Orla asked, he laughed and told her the price was a dance.

She danced. The floor was cold and the fiddle was out of tune, and the chains he gave her swung from her waist and rang softly with every turn, each little drop striking the one below. When the candles guttered she found the stranger gone, and the paper flowers had turned to ash in the trunk.

In spring she pushed back her sleeve and inked a lotus, with its layered petals and the chain hung below, and the ringing went quiet. Orla swept the floor the next winter, and the winter after, and she never once asked for the price back.