Black and grey botanical tattoo of a lotus with mandala detailing and dotted lines, placed on the centre of the chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and mandala design on the chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus flower design with layered petals, leaves and a central mandala, drawn in black linework. Fine stippling and dotted lines add texture and shading, with paisley-style curls inside the outer petals. The design is centred on the torso and fills most of the frame against pale skin, with a dotted arc running beneath it.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Lotus Mandala Leaves Petal Paisley Dot Flower

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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

Ruth Ancell had been pricking dots into the sandalwood lid since the Azores, one for every bell the watch struck, because the pattern would not sit still on a moving deck and counting kept her hand steady. The shawl it came from lay folded in her trunk, bought from a widow on a Liverpool dock who swore it had come up the river from Surat. Its paisley curls were inked in fine black, and Ruth meant to copy every one before the ship reached Madras.

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Mr Doyle, the second mate, leaned over her shoulder most evenings with his pipe unlit. He liked to tell her the lotus was a flower that grew out of mud and still came up clean, which she thought was a sailor's notion of comfort. She drew the petals in layers, then the leaves at the edges, then the mandala at the heart, taking its rings from the brass compass rose bolted above the binnacle. The dotted arc beneath she left until last.

Off Cape Verde the sea went black and the wake caught fire with tiny green lights, and Ruth sat on the hatch with the lid across her knees and the needle in her fingers. The arc she had been counting was the same length as the course Doyle pencilled each noon on the chart below the saloon table, a line of little crosses running from Gravesend towards the Indian coast. She pricked the final dot and found, to her surprise, that it sat exactly where the ship was now, and that she could not yet say which of the two she had been drawing all along.