Jared came in loving the flowers I’d been sketching back in 2018, but he wanted something more—his favourite song, folded into the design. On top of that, he had this idea of a mandala, delicate and symmetrical.

It was a mess of ideas on paper at first—a bouquet, a melody, geometry—but that’s where the fun begins.

After a few rounds of back and forth, we found a way to thread them together: his song’s waveform, bent and looped into a circle, tracing the lines of a mandala. Music frozen in ink, petals radiating from sound.

When Jared left, he was buzzing with excitement. And me? I walked away with the strange satisfaction of knowing what a stylus must feel like, carving its path along the grooves of a record.