Black line drawing of a radial star-shaped design with a heart-shaped centre and script-like characters, shown as a flash sketch on a grey background.

Radial star design with script characters

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a symmetrical radial design with pointed petals arranged in concentric rings around a small heart-shaped centre. Rays extend outward from the outer points, and script-like characters are set inside each segment. The linework is fine and even in black ink on a light grey, mottled background with no shading.

Geometric Star Lotus Heart Script Sun rays Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Uncle Tam never let me start at the edge. You begin with the heart in the middle, he said, because everything else is only a way of holding it still. So every morning I sat at the low table in the back of the print shop with a sheet of cheap paper, a steel nib and a bottle of ink the colour of wet coal, and I drew the small heart first, then the petals fanning out around it like a lotus opening in slow motion.

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The characters were the hard part. Each one had to be copied from the book without thinking about what it meant, because Tam said meaning arrives on its own if the hand is steady. I was not steady. In the second week I drew the seventh segment twice and the eighth not at all, and he tore the sheet in half without looking up from his tea. 'The rays are for whoever is looking,' he said, 'the points are for whatever is coming. Don't get them mixed.'

The monsoon came early that year and the roof leaked onto the table. I moved the work under a tin bucket and kept going, the rain drumming on the paper while I inked the last outer rays, the thin wavy lines that Tam always said were the hardest to keep honest. When the water finally stopped I looked up and Tam was standing in the doorway with his coat on, watching the page over my shoulder.

He took the drawing, held it to the grey light from the street, and said nothing for a long time. Then he pinned it to the wall beside the others, hundreds of sheets of the same flower gone brown at the edges, and tapped the tip of the nearest ray. 'Good,' he said. 'Now you can leave the centre to me.'