Black ink drawing of a symmetrical mandala with lotus-like petals and dotwork shading, shown on paper beside a hand wearing a silver ring.

Mandala flash design on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala drawn in black ink on pale paper, built from layered lotus-like petals around a central rosette of dots and small curls. The fine linework is combined with stippled dotwork shading in the petals and along the outer edges, with small swirl motifs extending from the top, bottom and sides. The design is monochrome, and a hand with a silver ring rests at the lower left edge of the frame.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Lotus Flower Petal Dot Swirl Paper Hand Ring

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell,

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The lotus in the bottom pond opened on Tuesday, a week later than last year, and Mr Pardoe made me kneel on the wet boards with a pencil so I would understand how it is built. Each petal sits under the last like slates on a roof, he said, and the rows keep pulling inward until they reach the middle, where the seed head sits like a pepper pot full of holes. He drew it for me on the back of a seed catalogue. I thought it looked like a crown someone had folded up small.

He keeps his drawings in a biscuit tin under the potting bench, all of them the same shape. Forty years of petals in ink, the dots pricked in with the tip of a nib so the paper goes grey at the edges. Yesterday he took out the newest one and showed me the ring of dots along the outside. Count them, he told me, and when I did there were eighty-one. He said that was no accident. Every dot is a seed the pond gave him, and he has never once let a year pass without writing the number down.

I went down before the greenhouse opened this morning with a torch I didn't need, and I counted the seed heads floating on the water. There were eighty-one. I stood there so long my knees went numb. I didn't tell him. Instead I pressed one of the brown husks between the pages of your birthday book, and I am sending it with this letter so you can count them yourself.

Love, Ada