Black and grey tattoo of a seated Buddha in front of a large lotus flower and mandala, on the thigh.

Seated Buddha and lotus on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A seated Buddha with closed eyes and a topknot sits in front of a large open lotus, with a mandala of layered petals behind the head and short rays radiating above. The outlines are clean and bold, with stippled dotwork shading in the mandala and soft grey shading on the figure and petals. The design is in black ink and greys and fills the upper thigh, shown against a dark fabric and a grey surface.

Dotwork Botanical Thigh Buddha Lotus Mandala Sun rays Seated figure Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, you with the cold hands, and do not interrupt when the wind comes round the pass, because it always comes round at the good part. Two winters ago a salt trader called Dorje Wangchen came up the north track with eleven yaks and a debt he could not say aloud. Below the last cairn there is a shelter of grey stone, and inside it sat a man who looked carved from the rock, cross-legged, eyes shut, with the low sun behind his head like a wheel of brass rays.

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Dorje set down his load to rest and found the man was not stone. He was breathing. Beside him, in a crack where nothing should grow, a single lotus had opened, white as milk, its petals layered like the rings of a mandala someone had scratched into the cliff with a fingernail.

"You are heavy with something," the seated man said without opening his eyes. "Put it down here. It will be lighter for having been seen."

So Dorje told him about the salt that had turned to damp in a flooded store, and the men waiting in the valley with their hands out. The man listened the way the lake listens to rain. When Dorje finished, the man only said, "The lotus does not grow in the mud because it wishes to be clean. It grows there because the mud is where it is."

Dorje went down the pass with his yaks and his debt still on his back. Yet in the valley the salt sold at a fair price, and some say the shelter grows a new lotus every spring, and the wind in the pass never blows through it without stopping for a moment.