Flash sheet of ten numbered black ink mandala designs, several with stippled dotwork shading and floral, lotus-like centres, drawn on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ten black ink mandala designs on a flash sheet

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet showing ten numbered circular mandala designs drawn in black ink on white paper. Each mandala has radial symmetry with petal, lotus and star-like forms, and the linework ranges from fine detail to bold outlines. Several designs use stippled dotwork shading in the centres or outer rings, and the sheet has no colour.

Geometric Dotwork Mandala Flower Lotus Star Petal Pattern Circle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had been falling on the Hollin Gate inn for nine days when Marit took the last candle down to the cellar and found the stranger's ink pots lined up on the bottom step. There were ten of them, small glass pots with cork stoppers, and beside them a pen cut from a goose quill and a sheet of paper so thin the lamplight came through it.

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The stranger had come in on the ninth day with no bag, only a wet wooden case under one arm. He paid for his bed in pennies still warm from his palm. Every night after supper he sat by the stove and drew circles. They were not plain circles. Each one opened from its centre the way a flower does, petals inside petals, then points like stars, then rows of dots so fine that Marit's mother, who cooked for the inn, said she would have needed a whole winter to count them.

On the tenth night the wind dropped and the valley went quiet. In the morning his room was empty and the bed was made tight as a drum. On the table lay ten mandalas in black ink, each one numbered. Beneath the last he had written, in a careful hand, "Draw the middle first and the rest will know where to go."

That evening Marit tried it on the frosted window of her room, a circle with a lotus at its heart. By dawn the frost had grown petals of its own, pushing outward from her line as if the glass had been waiting for them. The road below was clear. She left the window as it was, and when the sun came through, it threw a small black star across the floorboards.