Hand-drawn tattoo flash of a geometric lotus mandala with a three-dimensional impossible triangle at its centre, shaded in red and blue ink.

Lotus mandala with impossible triangle design

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A pen and ink drawing on cream paper shows a symmetrical lotus mandala with layered petals and an eight-pointed star behind them. At the centre sits an impossible triangle, drawn as an optical illusion with a hatched inner grid of lines. The petals and star are softly shaded in red-purple and blue-grey, with fine hatching on the inner petals and a bold outline throughout.

Geometric Botanical Lotus Mandala Triangle Star Geometric pattern Petal

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Your father's surveyor's chain is still cold in your hand when the path turns back on itself for the third time, and you stop counting the rise because the numbers have stopped agreeing with each other. Behind you, the last cottage of Hollin Cross has its shutters open to the lane. Ahead, the beech trunks stand in rings like the petals of a flower someone pressed flat in a book.

Keep reading

Sister Agnes at the mill had warned you. She said the triangle in the wood was not a thing you walked to but a thing that walked you, three sides and no corner you could ever stand on. Your father drew it once in the margin of a boundary survey, then tore the sheet off and burned it in the grate so you would not be tempted. You are tempted. You have the chain, a pencil, and a pocketful of crumbs for marking the trees.

At the centre of the rings a clearing opens, and the ground there is ruled with fine lines like the ribs of a shell. You lay the chain along the edge. It runs true for one side, then another, and when you reach your starting stone the bracken lies the wrong way round. You score a cross into the nearest beech. Then you find the next beech already scored with a cross, in your own hand, the bark healed over a little, as though you had been here for years.

You turn for the village. The eight points of the star carved above the lychgate are sharp in the dusk, and for the first time you read them as a way home rather than a way out. You walk down, and the lane stays exactly as long as it should be.