Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala tattoo on the top of a foot

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey mandala made of dots and fine lines sits on the top of a bare foot, with a scalloped, symmetrical pattern fanning out from the centre. A hand holds a small applicator brush and dabs orange product from a jar onto the skin beside the design, against a pale towel. The shading is built from stippled dots, and the composition is close and cropped to the foot and hand.

Dotwork Geometric Other Mandala Foot Dot Pattern Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The signalman's widow at Coldharbour Halt said the trains only kept time because of the dots. Every spring she walked the platform on her knees with a bodkin and a pot of soot, pricking rings of small dark marks into the stone wherever a wheel had worn it smooth. Fifty-two petals on the down platform, twelve on the up, and one flower at the centre of the turntable where the engines turned. Nobody asked her why. The railway men called it superstition, and they said it kindly, the way you talk to a horse that has taken against a gate.

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The spring the new line came through, the surveyors laughed at her pattern and rolled their drawings over it. Within a week the points froze at the junction, a goods train ran the level crossing with its brakes slack, and the station cat would not stop yowling at the foot of the footbridge. Mrs Ashdown took her bodkin out at dusk. She had no soot left, so she pressed her thumb into the red wax of a sealing tin and dabbed the colour beside each dot, one petal at a time, until the skin on her thumb was raw.

By morning the points had thawed. The surveyors did not mention the drawings again, and the brakes on the goods train were found to be sound, though nobody could say why the driver had felt so certain they were not. Mrs Ashdown kept the tin on the windowsill of the ticket office, and when the children asked what the dots were for, she told them the same thing every time: a station is only a flower that the trains have agreed to visit.