Black ink drawing of an ornamental mandala with paisley-like petals and fine dotted detail on white paper, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental mandala design drawn in black ink

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala-style design drawn in black ink on white paper, with four pointed sections radiating from a central motif. The linework is fine and dense, with scalloped edges, teardrop petals, dots and small curled flourishes filling each section. The design is in plain black ink with no colour, and the composition is centred on the page with a faint grey shadow visible below it.

Mandala Paisley Ornamental Floral pattern Dot Scallop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tally book lived in the net loft, under a coil of tarred twine, and my aunt Morag kept it there for the same reason she kept her good scissors out of the rain. Every evening after the Kittiwake came in, she sat on an upturned creel and drew in the margins while the men counted boxes. Her pencil never stopped. Scallops first, then the dots, then the little teardrops she said were herring eyes, though nobody had ever seen a herring with a pattern like that.

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The February the Mary Ross went out and did not come back, the book stayed shut for three days. Nobody wanted to be the one to open it. On the fourth morning I found it on the bench, open at a page with a four-pointed design spreading across both sides, the ink gone dark where she had pressed too hard. She had drawn it from the net itself, she told me, the way the mesh opened into diamonds when you pulled it square.

I asked her what the star was for. She tapped the centre, where a small heart-shaped motif sat inside the lace. 'Something to steer by that isn't a light,' she said. 'You draw it until your hand is too tired to think about the sea.' Then she handed me the pen and said the last petal was mine to finish, and I sat there until the tide turned, filling the gaps with dots, one small circle for every name on the crew list.

When the Mary Ross came round the point in May, short one man and with her wheelhouse painted over, the first thing I did was count the dots. There were nineteen. I had not finished them all, but I had got near enough, and Morag nodded, the way she did when a knot held.