Black and grey mandala flash design with a central flower, layered petals, leaves and pointed geometric outer border, drawn on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala flower design in black and grey

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala drawing built around a central flower with layered petals and a dotted centre. Surrounding rings of scalloped petals, leaves and diamond-shaped points radiate outwards. The linework is crisp black with stippled dot shading and light grey tonal fills on an off-white paper background.

Geometric Botanical Dotwork Mandala Flower Lotus Petal Leaves Dot Diamond

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The nets came up empty for nine weeks, and the men of Skerrow Haven stopped talking on the quay. Only Mairi Gall kept walking down to the slip each dawn with her pencil case and a roll of cartridge paper, because her husband had sailed the Ellen Rae in the spring and nobody had seen the boat since.

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She drew at the kitchen table by the stove. She drew a flower with a centre like a seed head, petals stacked in rings, a border of scallops and leaves, and between the points small black diamonds that her mother had called doors. In the middle she pressed dots with the blunt end of a nib, one by one, counting under her breath until the count came out even. The harbourmaster laughed at it. The boatbuilder did not laugh. He painted it across the bow of the last hull in the shed, grey below and white at the rim, and nobody asked him why.

The Ellen Rae came in on the ninth tide of the tenth week, low in the water, with no nets aboard and no men either. Only a boy of twelve was in the wheelhouse, asleep with both hands still locked on the wheel. When he woke he said the sea had shown him a flower the size of the moon and told him to keep the dots on his left. The paper charts, checked afterwards on the harbour wall, showed a course that followed the rings exactly, out past the reef and back again.

The next morning Mairi found her drawing pinned to the shed door. Someone had added a tenth petal in pencil, neat and small, and the nets that had hung dry all winter came up so heavy with herring that two men had to haul them together.