Two pen drawings of lotus and mandala-style band designs with dotted and triangular borders, drawn on cream paper beside two pens.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and geometric band designs on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

Two hand-drawn tattoo designs sit on cream paper. Each shows a central lotus-like motif with pointed petals, flanked by a banded border of triangles, scrolls and hanging dots. The linework is fine and black, with stippled dots and small curls adding texture, and the designs are arranged diagonally across the sheet.

Dotwork Geometric Lotus Mandala Dot Triangle Band Scroll Border

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

You inherit the ledger before you inherit the house, which is how Mrs Pallister likes things done. It sits on the hall table at Marram Lodge with a pen tied to it by a length of green wool, and every page is columns of guests' names in brown ink and, in the margins, small careful drawings nobody asked for. A lotus with pointed petals. A band of triangles running like a fence along the foot of the page. Little dots trailing beneath them, as if someone had tried to count the rain.

Keep reading

The first Thursday of October, a man in a wet mackintosh asks whether the room with the sea view still has its brass bedstead. You tell him it does. He signs the ledger without reading the terms, then stops at the drawings and traces the petals with one finger. Did she draw those, he asks. Your predecessor, you say, though you have never seen her. Mrs Pallister's sister, who left in a hurry and took nothing but a sketchbook and a bottle of Indian ink.

That night you turn the pages back to the beginning, past the bills and the weather notes, and find the sketches grow more certain as the years go on. The petals sharpen. The scrolls curl tighter. Near the last page there is a band drawn twice, once in pencil and once in pen, and beside it, in Mrs Pallister's cramped hand, a single line: She wanted it on the inside of her wrist, where the tide can't reach. You close the ledger. Outside the wind comes up off the bay and rattles the sash, and somewhere below, a guest is humming the same tune she used to hum.