Black ink drawing of an ornate lotus-style mandala with dotwork shading, fine line detail and dangling drop ornaments, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lotus mandala design with hanging drops

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus-like mandala sits at the centre of the sheet, with a pointed top and a bulbous lower section. Its petals and inner panels are built from fine line work, dotwork stippling and small teardrop and bead details, with strands of dots and drop pendants hanging from the sides and base. The design is drawn in black pencil or ink on plain pale paper, with no colour.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Lotus Drop Ornament Pendant Bead

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The road out of Sallow Wells ran eleven miles without a bend, and in the dry years a man could walk it all day and see nothing but his own shadow. Old Mirrat kept the well there with a tin cup, a thin goat and a string of clay beads her mother had made, one bead for every rain she had seen fall. By the fourth dry year the string had grown short and the well had sunk to a cold green mouth that she would not let anyone drink from.

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A tinsmith came up the road one afternoon with a cart full of pots and a face burned the colour of brick. He asked for water. Mirrat told him the well was low and he could have a cupful at dawn. He sat on her step anyway and waited, and when she came out at night she found him drawing in the dust with a stick. It was a flower standing on a point, its petals layered like the leaves of a lamp, and from its edges hung small drops strung on thread. He said it was a lotus, the kind that grows in the marsh far south where the river never runs dry, and that the drops were the rain it kept for itself.

It rained the following week, the first real rain in four years. Water ran off the roof, down the step and into the sand where the stick lines were, and in the morning a pale lotus stood there with its petals fringed in beads of water, each one catching the light like one of her mother's clay beads. The tinsmith was gone and his cart tracks had washed out. Nobody in Sallow Wells believed the flower came from a stranger's stick, but nobody would pull it up either.

Mirrat still keeps the cup on the step. When a traveller asks her why the well is open to anyone now, she points at the flower by the road and says the water was never the thing that ran short out here.