Red line drawing of a symmetrical mandala with petal shapes, dot rows and teardrop motifs on a white background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red mandala design on white

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A symmetrical mandala design drawn in red lines on a plain white background. A central medallion of dotted petals sits inside four pointed lobes, each filled with fine scrollwork, and rows of dots and teardrops radiate outward. The linework is fine and even, with solid red in the outer teardrops and dot patterns.

Dotwork Mandala Floral pattern Dot Teardrop Petal Symmetrical design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the lift's been out since Tuesday so you may as well hear it on the landing. Fourteen floors of stairs, and the only thing worth climbing them for was Rukhsana's table by the bins. She kept a cone of henna in her apron pocket and could draw a whole sun on your palm before the kettle boiled.

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The winter the boiler died, she took her cone up to the top landing where the paint was flaking and drew for the Okafor girl, who was marrying a boy from Bradford and wanted her hands done before the coach left. Nobody had a torch. Rukhsana worked by the grey light from the stairwell window, one dot at a time, petal inside petal, teardrops running out to the edges like rain falling the wrong way. She said the pattern had to close on itself or the marriage would leak.

It took her three hours. When she finished, the paste had dried into a rust-red mandala on the plaster, four lobes and a dotted centre, and the caretaker came up with a bucket and stood there holding it. He never painted it over. He said you can't scrub a blessing off concrete, and anyway the council would only send a man from Croydon.

So that's the landing. Every time you climb the stairs, count the dots. There are a hundred and eight, she made sure of that, and if you lose your place you start again from the middle, which is where she always told us the good things were kept.