Hand-drawn yin yang design with a rainbow watercolour half, a black ink mandala and lotus half, and the words find balance in brush script beneath.

Yin yang with mandala and lotus design

Mixed · Flash

A yin yang symbol is split into a rainbow watercolour half and a black ink half filled with mandala patterns, a lotus flower and a central circular motif. The linework is fine and dense on the black side, while the coloured side uses soft blended washes in orange, pink, blue and purple. The words find balance in brush lettering sit below, with ink drips falling from the bottom of the lotus.

Yin yang Mandala Lotus Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink had already started to run when Brother Anselm told Tomas to stop fussing and let the brush go. Tomas had been given the black, which meant the long dense lines the old scribes used for their mandalas, each ring fitted inside the last until a man's eyes went soft trying to follow them. Anselm had the colour. He worked the washes in the order the river merchants had taught him, orange bleeding into pink, pink into the blue the abbot liked to call the colour of cold water.

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Abbot Giles had asked for a single wheel for the chapter house, half light and half dark, and had said only that the two halves must meet along a line nobody could see. For three weeks the brothers bent over the paper. Tomas drew lotus petals the way his mother had kneaded bread, too careful, afraid of tearing. Anselm laughed at him, and then, when the petals came out wrong, stopped laughing and taught him to stop looking at the mistake.

On the last night a storm came off the hills and rain blew sideways through the cloister arches. Tomas had left the sheet pinned flat on the table to dry. He woke to thunder and found the black had pooled in a fold near the lotus and crept, slowly, into the orange at the edge. Anselm was already there with a rag, but Tomas caught his wrist. Neither of them spoke. The ink ran down the lotus stem and dripped off the lower edge of the paper onto the flagstones below.

By morning the drips had dried into a grey tongue on the stone. The abbot came down the steps with his hands folded in his sleeves, looked at the painting and then at the stain, and nodded once. He said the two halves had met after all, just not on the paper. Nobody scrubbed the floor. Tomas still walks around it on his way to the refectory, and each time he does he thinks of the small coloured circle at the centre of the lotus, which Anselm would not let him touch.