Black fine line lotus tattoo with dotwork chain drops on the forearm, shown in a black and grey photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus with dotted chain details on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower sits at the centre of the design, with pointed petals, leaf-like sprigs and a mandala-style pattern in the middle. Strings of dots and fine chains hang from the outer petals and down to a single dotted line below. The linework is fine and black with stippled dotwork detail, and the photo is black and grey with a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Dotwork Botanical Forearm Lotus Mandala Chain Dot Leaves Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boarding house on Marrow Lane had nine rooms and one working bath, and Mrs Ferrier kept the key to the linen cupboard on a string around her neck, the way other women wore lockets. I was sixteen the summer I was sent there to help with the breakfasts, and I learnt quickly that she counted everything: eggs, spoons, the drips from the tap in number four.

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The only thing she did not count was the lamp on the back step. Every evening she set a brass one out there, its glass chimney sooted at the rim, and filled it with paraffin from a can she kept behind the coal. Nobody asked what it was for. The fishermen's wives said it was for their husbands, and the lodgers said it was for the moths, and I said nothing because I had seen her sit beside it with a pencil and a pad of tissue paper, drawing the same flower over and over, a bloom with pointed petals that opened like a hand held out, with a little sprig of leaves at each side and a fine dotted line hanging beneath it like beads on a thread.

On the last night of August she gave me the paper. The drawing was the flower, but the centre had changed; where the petals met there was a pattern of circles inside circles, each one pricked with tiny dots. "For your arm," she said, "when you have one." I told her I would never have such a thing. She only looked at the lamp and said the tide was turning, and that the trick with a wick was to trim it before you needed the light, not after.

I still have the tissue paper. The lamp went to the rubbish with the rest of the house when they knocked it down. I trim my own wicks now, and I have the flower where she meant me to have it.