Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo with a dotted chain and geometric drop motifs running down the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dotwork lotus mandala on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower sits at the centre of a mandala-style design, with layered petals and fine ornamental scrolls. Stippled dotwork shading fills the petals and background, and a dotted line with small geometric drops descends from the flower to the lower end of the design. The image is a close, straight-on black and white photograph against a dark backdrop, with the design filling most of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Calf Lotus Mandala Flower Dot Chain Drop Ornament

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

Sit closer, the lamp only gives so much, and you will want to hear the part about the beads, because the children always lean in there. This is the story of the lotus that grew out on the salt flats, where the Ketter road runs straight as a ruler until it forgets itself. Hasna Dorr drove that road with a cart of dried dates and a brass chain of forty-one beads her mother had strung for her wedding. At the fourth well the chain snapped. The beads ran off the tailboard and dropped into the sand in a loose line, each one bouncing once and going still. She did not stop to gather them. A storm was building over the ridge, dark as spilled ink, and a carter who stays for beads is a carter who gets buried with them.

Keep reading

Three nights later a shepherd crossing that flat found a pale flower standing where the last bead had fallen. Where each of the others had landed, the sand was pricked with tiny white points, as if someone had pressed a stylus into it a thousand times. The petals were layered like the folds of a good wedding shawl, and every line of them was made of small dots, the way the desert stipples itself after the one rain of the year. The shepherd took a chip of salt-silver from his pocket and hung it from the stem, because that is what travellers did when they passed a thing worth remembering.

Hasna came back the next spring with the dates. She found the flower taller than a man and hung with twenty-odd drops of silver, each one left by someone who had stopped to look. She counted the dotted line down from its centre to the ground, and she counted forty beads in the dust. She never found the forty-first. The lotus had it, we say, held low on its stem where the chain still hangs, and every year it lifts a little higher, as though it means to show her where it went.