Two circular mandala designs drawn in reddish-brown line work on a white background, one with scrolls and a central dot, the other with layered petals and a spiral centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two circular mandala designs in red-brown line

Colour · Flash

The image shows two circular mandala-style designs, one above the other, drawn in reddish-brown ink on white. The upper design has a scalloped outer edge, radiating striped petals, scroll motifs and a small flower-like centre. The lower design uses layered pointed petals in concentric rings around a spiral centre, with solid areas of ink framing the open line work.

Mandala Rosette Flower Petal Scroll Spiral Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday. The lift in Harcourt House has been out since the weekend, so I climbed to the fourteenth floor with the spare paint tins for Mrs Okafor's hall and had to stop on every landing like a man running for a bus he has already missed. Mr Vell from the flat below says the council will get round to it in spring, which is what he said last spring too.

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I met the girl who lives opposite the stairwell, Priya, the one with the bicycle wheel chained to the railings. She was sitting on the step with a cardboard box full of pressed-flower paper and a biro, drawing circles inside circles, each one with petals pointing outward like the sun trying to get in through a window. She said her nan used to do them on the back of envelopes while waiting for the bus to Southall, and that you were not allowed to lift the pen until the centre closed up. I asked what happens if it doesn't close. She said then you start again, and that is the whole trick of it.

I did not tell her I have been trying to paint the damp patch above my bed into something lovelier for three months. I went in and got the brush and sat on the step beside her, and we worked on the same circle for an hour, one of us drawing scallops, the other filling the gaps, until the light through the stairwell window went orange and the lift still said OUT OF ORDER in red marker.

When I got back up to the fourteenth floor the damp had not changed. But the spiral in the notebook had closed at last, neat as a snail shell, and I drew one more ring around it before I went to bed.