Black ink linework drawing of a mandala-style lotus flower inside a crescent moon, with swirls and diamond drops, drawn on paper as a tattoo design.

Lotus and crescent moon mandala design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pen drawing on paper of a lotus flower with layered petals and a mandala-style centre, set inside a crescent moon. The linework is fine and even, with dense scalloped and dotted fills in the moon and petals, and swirling scrolls and diamond-tipped drops extending from the lower and upper edges. The design is in black ink only on a white sheet, with two fineliner pens resting at the top right.

Botanical Geometric Lotus Crescent moon Mandala Swirl Diamond Dot Petal

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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

The pattern had to be finished before the tide turned, so Ruth sat on the harbour steps with a fineliner between her teeth and a sheet of trace paper held down by a sea-smoothed stone. Her father had drawn lotus flowers for the tile works in Saltcombe for thirty-one years, and he used to say a petal was only a promise you kept by counting. The works had shut in the spring. This sheet was the last thing he drew before his hand began to shake.

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She worked the scallops first, row after row of small curved teeth around the moon's belly, then the dots that ran up the thin outer horn like sparks off a struck flint. Her father's lines never wobbled, but they were never quite straight either. Where the crescent met the bloom, he had drawn the inner curve in pencil and left it unfinished, as if he had meant to come back and decide what the moon was holding.

By the time the lamps came on along the quay, she understood it. The moon was not cradling the flower. It was opening the way the flower opened, both of them unfinished at the edge. She inked the last diamond drop at the base, hanging straight down like a plumb line, and left the final dot beside it bare.

The tide came in over the bottom step while she packed her pens. She did not rub out the pencil. She let the gap stay open, the way he had left it, and walked home with the sheet folded inside her coat.