Pencil drawing of a symmetrical lotus-style mandala with spirals and Celtic knots, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Symmetrical lotus mandala with Celtic knots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical design built around a central flower with pointed petals, swirling spirals and three interlaced Celtic knots at the top, bottom and sides. The linework is dark and smooth, with soft pencil shading that gives the petals and background areas depth. The image is entirely greyscale and centred on a pale, plain background.

Botanical Geometric Lotus Flower Mandala Celtic knot Spiral Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the cake will keep, and you'll not hear the rest of it standing by the urn. My mother's uncle Tomas forged the ironwork on every gate in Carrick Bay, and he told me this one the summer the Pryce boy married the miller's girl in a field full of wet hay.

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The bride came up the lane in borrowed boots, because her own had sunk in the marsh that morning. The old ferry was broken and the tide was in, so she had to cross through the reeds where the lotus grows in still water, pale as candle wax, opening one petal at a time. Tomas always said a flower that blooms out of mud has no business looking so clean, and that was the first thing he ever told me to remember.

When the vows were read, the knot Tomas had hung over the chapel door would not sit straight. Three loops went round one another, and from the pews you could never tell which one began the others. The groom laughed and said that was the point of it. The miller, who had said nothing all week, got up, walked to the door, and laid his thumb on the central spiral until it stopped turning.

He took his hand away and went back to his seat without a word. The fiddler started, and the girl's borrowed boots kept time on the flagstones all the way through the reel. Those boots are still hanging in the chapel porch, and the lotus at the foot of the gate opens every June in the reeds, though nobody in Carrick Bay has ever seen the knot hang straight since.