Black and grey dotwork mandala tattoo wrapping around a forearm, with a band of script across the centre and a lotus drop below.

Mandala armband with script on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala covers the forearm, with a band of Devanagari script running across its centre and a lotus-like motif hanging from the lower edge on a fine line. The mandala is built from layered petals, rings and dotted shading, rendered entirely in black and grey ink. The tattoo fills most of the frame against a soft, out-of-focus warm background.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Mandala Script Lotus Pendant

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Dhillon had kept the pond behind her terrace for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had ever got the lotus to flower before June. My job was to clear the silt in March, when the water was still the colour of stewed tea and the frogs hadn't yet decided to come back.

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She gave me a notebook with a list in biro. Top line: pump, check. Second line: ask Mr Kaur about the bulb. Third line: do not, under any circumstances, touch the blue tin on the shelf. I did as I was told for a fortnight. On the fifteenth morning the tin had shifted an inch to the left and its lid had a ring of damp on it, and I knew she had been out there before me.

We ate our toast on the back step, watching the water. She said the tuber had come from her mother's garden in a village she left as a girl, wrapped in a tea towel inside her handbag, through two airports and a long wait at a railway station. "It did not want to come," she said. "Nothing worth having comes easily." Then she tapped the tin with a fingernail and said I could look now.

Inside was a folded square of paper, a pinch of dried petals, and a silver pendant no bigger than a thumbnail, a lotus with its petals still curled shut. Beneath it she had written a line in the careful hand she used for her recipe cards. I asked what it said. She shook her head. "Read it when the flower opens, and not before."

The bud opened the following week, pale pink at dawn. I read the line aloud to the pond, badly, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down on the step.