Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a mandala, lotus and peony across the forearm.

Mandala, lotus and peony on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A large mandala with a central lotus flower sits above a peony bloom and leaves. The linework is bold and outlined, with fine dotted stippling shading the petals and background. The tattoo is in black and grey ink and fills the forearm from the wrist-side leaves up toward the elbow.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on the Saltgate market since before the bells, and Mabel Orrin had sold nothing but a single peony by noon. The bloom was wet at its heart, its outer petals loose as a coat left open. Across the aisle, the old lotus woman packed her stall under a tarpaulin, saying nothing, which was how she said most things.

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Mabel had been told as a girl that a mandala was a map of the world drawn small enough to carry. Her grandmother kept one pressed inside a hymn book, its rings of tiny dots like rain on a window. When the lotus woman finally spoke, she said the flower in the middle was the only part that mattered, because it grew up out of mud and still came out clean. Mabel thought that was a lot to put on a flower.

At dusk the rain thinned to a grey drizzle, and a boy came running with a coin in his fist, asking for the cheapest thing on the stall. Mabel gave him the peony anyway, and took his coin only to be polite. He held the wet bloom like a lantern and walked off towards the river, the leaves dripping along the pavement behind him.

The next morning the lotus woman's stall was gone, and so was the tarpaulin. Mabel found a single dry petal on her counter, pressed flat under a stone, with a ring of pricked dots around its edge. She kept it in her apron pocket for years, and never once asked where the woman had gone.

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