Black ink mandala-style lotus tattoo with dot accents centred on a person's upper back, shown in two photographs.

Mandala lotus tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A diptych showing a black ink lotus flower tattoo on the upper back, with ornamental mandala-like detailing in the petals and a central teardrop motif. A column of three dots runs beneath the flower, and the tattoo is shown in a wide view on the left and a close view on the right. The linework is crisp with solid black fills and fine hatching, and the background is a plain skin tone with soft natural light.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Mandala Dot Flower Teardrop Back

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus was the only pattern on Skerrin that nobody could read but Nan, and she had been gone eleven weeks when the ferryman brought her pricking card across in a feed sack. Its holes were punched in rings, each ring a petal, and below the flower three pinholes stood in a line, as though she had counted them and stopped.

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I sat at her table with the lamp lit and the wind knocking at the shutters, and worked it out one ring at a time. The outer petals were simple buttonhole in a fan, the inner ones filled with fine hatching so the light would catch them the way it caught the wet rocks at low tide. The teardrop at the centre was the trouble. Someone had pricked it, then unpicked it, and a single dark thread still hung from the card where the needle had gone through twice. Tucked behind it was a note in her looping hand: Leave the teardrop for whoever comes back.

Declan came over on the Tuesday boat to see about the roof and stayed to argue about the roof. I showed him the card. He read the note, then counted the three pins, and said Nan had never once in his life left a hem unfinished. So we did it together, him holding the lamp, me drawing the thread through the last hole and pulling a single knot tight at the point of the teardrop.

When we hung the card in the window, the sun came through every hole at once and laid the lotus across the floorboards in small bright petals. Declan said it looked like something you'd find on the inside of a shell. I said it looked like something she had been waiting to see finished, and I left the lamp off so it would stay that way until morning.