Colour tattoo of an Om symbol with a shaded Buddha face and teal dotwork patterns on a limb, with a US quarter placed below for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Om symbol with Buddha face and teal dotwork

Dotwork · Other · Mixed · Photo

A large Om symbol fills the frame, with a shaded grey Buddha face set into the lower curve of the glyph. The inner areas are filled with stippled dotwork, mandala-like circles and a lotus-style pattern, with teal dots and shading adding colour. The skin is pale and the background is dark, and a US quarter sits below the tattoo for scale.

Dotwork Neo-trad Other Om symbol Buddha Mandala Lotus Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass bell hung above the door of Pell's chandlery in Corran Cove for nineteen years before anyone thought to ring it. You were eleven, sweeping sawdust for a penny a day, when you finally lifted the clapper and let it go. The note rolled down the quay and sent the gulls up off the pilings. Pell, a thin man who smelled of tar and peppermint, didn't look up from his ledger. He only said the bell had come off a trader out of Chittagong, along with a crate of teal glass beads that nobody in the cove would buy.

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Over the following summer you learned the bell's habits. Its brass went cold before a squall and warm before fog, and when you rubbed the rim with wet thumbs it hummed against the beads on the windowsill until the glass seemed to breathe. A seal was stamped on its lip: a curl like a wave folding back into itself, a lotus opening inside it, and at the bottom a stone face with its eyes half shut, as though listening to something far out to sea. Pell said the old traders rang it only at slack water, so a boat could tell its own heartbeat from the tide's.

The autumn the Marigold failed to come round the headland, fog rolled in on a Tuesday and stayed for three days. Pell was too unwell to climb the steps, so you took the clapper in both hands and rang it slowly, once for every breath you could count, until your arms shook. Somewhere past the breakwater a lamp swung, then steadied, then came in on the sound. Nobody thanked you. The beads on the sill still hummed when the sea went flat, and by winter Pell was pricing them at a shilling each.