Black line drawing of a lotus bloom with leaves above a crescent moon mandala, in a botanical and geometric style, shown without a body placement.

Lotus and crescent mandala design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a stylised lotus or tulip bloom with striped petals, flanked by sprigs of leaves and a small leaf below. Beneath it sits a crescent shape filled with radiating hatching, dotted arcs and a symmetrical central motif. The design is drawn in solid black lines on a plain white background with no colour.

Botanical Geometric Lotus Crescent Mandala Leaves Flower Hatching Symmetry

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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, because the pond only gives up its secret to people who can keep still. You'll have heard the old wives say the lotus at Harrowby Mill opened only on the thin nights, when the moon was a fingernail clipping. That was the summer of 1956, the summer the bakery burnt, and it was Mrs Aggie Clough who swore she saw it from her scullery window with a candle in one hand and a pastry brush in the other.

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She took the lantern down the towpath before her husband could stop her, and there it was, sitting on the black water with its petals striped like boiled sweets and a single bead of dew in the heart that refused to fall. Mr Haskell from the mill wanted it cut for the church fête. Aggie told him he could cut her first, and she meant it, and he went home with his tail between his legs.

She sat with that flower three nights running. She sketched it in the margin of the rent ledger, copying the sprigs of fern, the little leaf hanging under the bloom like a dropped earring, and the great bowed moon that hung over the reeds. Every line she drew she pricked with a pin so she'd remember where the hatching ran. On the fourth night the moon had gone clean out of the sky and the flower folded itself shut. The mill whistle never blew again, and by Monday the bakery had been rebuilt with a crescent carved above its door, all radiating lines and little dotted arcs, exactly as Aggie had drawn it.

So mind the thin moon this week. If the pond goes still and the water tastes of pennies, somebody on the towpath is keeping watch for her, and you'd do well to keep your lantern lit.