Pen drawing of a lotus flower flanked by crescent moons, with a dotted chain and teardrop pendants hanging below, in black ink on cream paper.

Lotus with crescent moons and dotted drapes

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a lotus flower with layered, faceted petals and shaded centre, set between two crescent moons. Below, a fine dotted chain of beads and teardrop pendants forms a drape across the lower half of the composition. The drawing is in black and grey with stippled shading, centred on a plain paper background.

Botanical Dotwork Geometric Lotus Crescent moon Bead Teardrop Chain Drapery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are sixteen the summer the travelling fair pitches on the common, and Mr Halloran's shop on Chapel Street is the only place in Thorne still cutting glass by hand. He lets you sweep the bench and sort the tin of loose beads: jet, cut crystal, brass rings nobody wants. Your job is to string them for the window, and you have learned that the trick is keeping the drape even, every dip the same depth, nothing crooked.

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On the Thursday a woman comes in with a moon-shaped brooch that has lost its pin. She lays it on the velvet and asks whether you can make something to match, something that will hang from a collar without pulling. You sketch on the back of a delivery note: a lotus opening between two crescents, its petals cut like the facets of a stone, and a fringe of teardrops falling beneath. Halloran reads it upside down, grunts, and that is how you know you have his permission.

The necklace takes eleven evenings. You work under the lamp after the shop shuts, the wire cold against your thumb, the wireless murmuring through the ceiling from the flat above. You count the beads twice each night and still find one short on the last, so you unpick a whole run and begin again, because a drape with a gap in it is only a string of tears.

On the Saturday she returns, takes the chain without a word, and holds it up to the window. The lowest drop catches the sun and throws a small pale crescent onto the wall, and then the lotus opens beside it, trembling slightly on the plaster. You look for something to say. Halloran, polishing a clock at the far end of the counter, says only, 'Keep the pattern. You'll be asked for it again.'