Black ink dotwork mandala design with lotus-like flowers, swirls and leaf motifs, touched with red watercolour, drawn on paper beside a red pencil.

Dotwork mandala leaf design

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A symmetrical design drawn on textured paper shows a mandala-style arrangement of layered petals, leaf shapes, dotted outlines and spiral scrolls. The linework is fine black ink, with stippled dotwork shading in the leaves and petals and solid dot borders. Soft red watercolour wash accents the central flower and lower petals, while the rest stays black and white. The design fills a tall, teardrop-shaped frame with the top tapering to a point.

Dotwork Botanical Mandala Lotus Flower Leaf Paisley Swirl Dot Scroll Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp at Skerrin Point had been dark for three nights when Mairi Lennox found the letter wedged under the scullery door, written in pencil on the back of a tide table. Her brother Angus had always written his messages that way, in small neat capitals that pressed hard enough to dent the paper. This one said only: the red lacquer on the lower ledge has cracked, bring the fine brush and the little pot of ochre, and do not let Father see you climb.

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She found the ledge where he said, behind the second gallery rail, where the iron had been painted over so many times the lettering of the old makers had gone soft as moss. Someone had been picking at the paint in a pattern: small dots, tidy as rivets, running around a spiral that curled inward like a fern. Angus had been drawing on the lighthouse. Mairi knelt on the wet grating with the wind pulling at her plait and matched the dots one by one, the way he had taught her to count the seconds between flashes.

By the time the sun dropped behind the Sound, the ochre wash had gone soft and bright along the petals, the colour of the cuttings their mother used to press between the pages of the Bible. Mairi climbed the last stair with the brush in her teeth and lit the lamp herself. Far out, a boat turned its bow towards the beam, and then another.

Her brother had never once come back to the point to finish a job, but the spiral was complete, and she found she did not mind finishing it for him.