Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lotus mandala design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus design drawn in black ink on white paper, with pointed petals, a central teardrop motif and a row of dots running down from the top. The linework is bold and even, with hatched petals, scrolling details and dotted ornament filling the interior of each shape. The image is monochrome and centred, with no body or skin visible.

Botanical Geometric Lotus Mandala Paisley Leaves Swirl Dot Teardrop

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond had been choked with blanket weed for two summers when I finally knelt at its edge with a bucket and Walter's old rubber gloves, still stiff from his hands. He had never let anyone touch it. Under the green mat the liner was sound, and in the silt I found a clay saucer, cracked clean through, with a lotus scratched into its glaze. Someone had drawn petals with pointed tips, a teardrop at the heart, and a line of dots running down like seeds falling from a seedhead.

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I took the saucer home and propped it on the windowsill, where the morning sun caught the dark lines. Every evening I traced the scrolls with a fingertip and counted the dots. There were nine, and I could not decide whether that was a number he had chosen or simply the number of seeds left in a pod he had once kept. My sister said I was getting sentimental over a dead man's crockery. She was right, and I kept counting anyway.

In April a pale shoot pushed through the silt at the deepest end, folded tight as a fist. I waited a fortnight, afraid to disturb it, then went out before work with a pen and my sketchbook. The bud was just breaking the surface, its tip shaped like the teardrop on the saucer. I drew it the way Walter must have, petal over petal, hatching the shadows, and when I reached the last dot I stopped, because the water had gone still and the bloom was opening.