Black and grey pen drawing of a hamsa hand with a lotus flower and dotted shading, sketched on grid paper with a hand holding the pen.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand and lotus design sketch on grid paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing of a hamsa hand, decorated with a heart, scrolls, leaf-like vines and a lotus flower at its centre. The outlines are bold and the shading is built from stippled dots, especially along the palm and fingers. The design is in black ink on squared paper, with a hand holding the pen at the right edge of the frame.

Dotwork Hamsa Hand Lotus Heart Scroll Vine Dot Sketch

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 big top had three tears in its roof by the time Mrs Okonedo asked me to draw the hand. Rain came through them during the second act, so the elephants were walked round the sawdust like wet dogs and the trapeze boys sat on the bench with their collars up. I had a squared pad from a schoolroom in Otley and a pen that wrote thin, and I'd been drawing posters for the ticket office for a month because nobody else could make a thing look like it meant it.

Keep reading

She wanted a hamsa for the caravan door, the open hand with a lotus in its palm. Her late husband had said a hand kept bad luck off a travelling show, and she believed him more than she believed the insurance man. I drew it out on the grid so I could count the fingers. Three in the middle, a heart cupped in the thumb's crook, scrolls curling like the ends of a ribbon. The lotus took longest. I shaded every petal with dots, because the ink wouldn't hold a line on damp card and dots went on evenly no matter how the paper sat.

By midnight the ring had gone quiet and I was still going under the work lamp, one dot at a time along the fingers, while the last bulb in the menagerie buzzed out. Mrs Okonedo came over with a flask of tea and stood looking at the page for a long while without saying anything.

'Thirty-one thousand dots,' she said at last. 'Did you count?'

'Somebody had to.'

She tapped the lotus with one finger, then folded the pad into her coat. In the morning the hand went up on the caravan door in green paint, and the grid lines showed faintly through the wet coat beneath it.