Pen drawing of a symmetrical dotwork mandala with a central flower and layered leaves, shown as a tattoo design on white paper beside two black fineliner pens.

Dotwork mandala flower design on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala design drawn on white paper, built around a central flower with layered lotus-like petals and leaves. The outlines are crisp and dark, while the petals, leaves and outer shapes are filled with stippled dots that create shading from dense to sparse. The image is black ink on paper with two pens resting at the top edge, and the design fills most of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Mandala Flower Lotus Leaves Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been told the stippling would take a fortnight, and that was the first lie the drawing told her. Every dot was a decision, she said, and a decision took exactly as long as it took to lower the pen and lift it again. Her father laughed from the doorway of the box room, where she had pinned the sheet of cartridge paper to an old drawing board and weighted its corners with a tin of tacks and a jar of cold tea.

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By the second week the lotus had grown its layers. She began at the centre, where the smallest petals curled in on themselves like a closed fist, and worked outward, so the dots thickened as the petals widened and thinned again toward the edge. On a Thursday the black fineliner ran dry in the middle of a leaf. She fetched the grey pen from her mother's tin of drawing things, and it made the outer shapes paler than she had meant. She left them that way. The wrong shade became the part she liked best.

On the last night the sky over the allotments was flat and grey. She finished the outermost leaf, the one that had sat empty since March, and leaned back on the stool until her spine clicked. Her father came in with two mugs and set one down beside the pens without a word. She had expected him to ask whether it was finished. Instead he looked at the centre for a long time and said he could not see where she had started.