Two blue ink dotwork mandala designs drawn on pale paper, one lower left and one upper right, with stippled petal shapes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two blue dotwork mandala designs on paper

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

Two separate mandala-style designs are drawn in blue ink on a pale, cream-coloured background. Each motif is built from radiating petal and leaf shapes with outlined edges and shading made of fine stippled dots. The designs sit diagonally across the page with small scattered dots around them.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Flower Petal Leaves Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lorry driver who gave me the lift out of Wadi Rum had a dashboard full of paper doilies, all of them bleached yellow by the sun. He said his mother had made them, one for every town she had never visited. I asked him how many he had left and he counted them on his fingers, which seemed to take a long time.

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We stopped at a petrol station where the pump had been painted the same ochre as the cliffs. Inside, a boy was sweeping up dust with a broom made of palm fronds, and the dust rose and settled, rose and settled, the way the little dots settle on a drawing when you stipple one petal at a time. I bought two bottles of water and a postcard of a lake I would never see. On the back I wrote my sister's address in Leeds, then crossed it out, then wrote it again.

The driver dropped me where the road split in two. He pointed at the left fork and said the old caravanserai was that way, half a day on foot, and that the wind out there sometimes shaped the sand into fans, into petals, into things a person could mistake for flowers if they had been awake all night. I asked if he had ever seen such a thing. He said no, but his mother had, and she had drawn it, and that was why the doilies were all the same shape.

I walked the left fork until the tarmac gave out. At the first ridge the sand had arranged itself into a rosette of ridges, perfect and patient, and I sat down in the middle of it with the postcard on my knee. I wrote nothing on it that time. I just let the wind pick at the corners until I had to hold it flat.