Black dotwork mandala design drawn on paper, with a radial centre, stippled petals and leaf sprays, in a geometric and botanical style.

Dotwork mandala with leaves

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala drawn in black ink on pale paper, built around a dense central starburst with a ring of dots. Outer rings of stippled petal shapes are surrounded by sprigs of pointed leaves and scattered dots that fade out towards the edges. The linework is fine and the shading is created entirely with stippled dots, with no colour or background detail.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Mandala Flower Leaves Dot Petal Starburst

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pattern book had come up from the cellar with its spine split and a pressed fern lodged between the pages, and Ruth refused to let Tobias trace anything until he had counted every dot in the starburst. Four hundred and twelve, he said. She said it was four hundred and eleven and made him do it again by the window, where the north light fell flat across the drawing board.

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The job was a dedication plate for a chapel in Hebden Bridge, a mandala of petals and leaf sprigs for a bell-ringer's wife who had died in March. Ruth had engraved for the cutlers' company for forty years and believed a stippled shadow should be made with patience and nothing else. Every petal was built from a hundred small pricks of the nib, so the light seemed to pool in the hollows rather than sit on top of them.

On the third night Tobias noticed the outer dots did not fade the way the book showed. They thinned out in a spiral, each one a little further from the last, until they ran off the edge of the paper into the margin. He said so. Ruth took the glass from him, looked for a long time, and then laughed, a dry sound like a page turning. 'That's the bit I left for whoever finishes the job,' she said. 'Someone always has to finish the job.'

They worked until the chapel bell rang six. The plate went up on the wall that Saturday, and Tobias never told anyone how many dots there were, because he had stopped counting somewhere past the ring and let the last ones trail out into the paper where nobody could check.