Black dotwork drawing of a symmetrical geometric design with a flower of life at its centre and stacked circles above and below, shown on cream paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork geometric design with flower of life

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical, symmetrical design centred on an overlapping flower of life inside a circle, with layered diamond and triangle shapes spreading out to either side. A column of graduated circles runs above and below the central motif. The design is built from fine stippled dots that shade the shapes and fade towards the edges, drawn in black ink on a cream background.

Dotwork Geometric Flower of life Circle Mandala Triangle Diamond Stipple

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Harrow Court stopped between the ninth and tenth floors for the fourth time that week, and I was the one holding the clipboard while the council's man swore at the panel. They wanted a survey before they wrote the block off. I was to count the cracked tiles, the damp patches and the doors that still had their numbers, and I was to be finished by Friday.

Keep reading

It was on the sixth-floor landing that I found the drawing. Someone had inked a flower of life on the breeze-block wall in biro, a circle of overlapping rings with a diamond either side, and then spent what must have been a whole week stippling it with dots so fine they looked like grit. Above it, a column of small circles climbed the wall, one for each landing, shrinking as they went. The caretaker, Mr Lowe, said a boy from flat 61 had done it the summer before the scaffolding went up, and that he had been told off for it and never once apologised.

I measured everything that Friday, and the drawing would not leave me alone. Its circles were exactly as far apart as the landings, and the diamonds sat square on the lines of the old courtyard, the one the council had paved over in 1974. Somebody had drawn the building's bones before anyone had written them down. I stood there with my pen over the box marked beyond repair and could not make the tick.

I left the box empty and took the stairs down, counting the landings through that small, patient wall, one dot for each step, until the last circle was under my feet and the lift was still stuck above me, humming to itself.