Black line drawing of a lotus flower tattoo design with dotwork shading and mandala-style detail, drawn on paper with no body part shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower design with dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower is drawn in black linework, with each petal filled with geometric patterns, small triangles and scattered dots. A row of dotted arcs and a small dotted pendant shape hangs beneath the flower. The design is shown in black ink on a plain cream background, with no colour.

Dotwork Botanical Lotus Flower Mandala Dot Petal Geometric pattern

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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 sketchbook came across my counter at ten past four, open to a single page. Someone had drawn a lotus with every petal filled in, triangles stacked like the teeth of a comb, and beneath it a string of dots that swung down in three loops and ended in a small ring. In twenty-two years at this crossing I have stamped medicine, wedding photographs, and a cage with a finch in it that the finch did not appreciate. I had never stamped dots.

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"What is it for?" I asked the young man holding it. He said his grandmother had drawn it from memory on the back of a ferry ticket the winter the river took her village, because the photograph of her mother's pond had gone under with everything else. Each dot, he said, was a night she had counted walking west with a bundle on her back. I wrote nothing down. The coach behind him was ticking as it cooled, and forty people were waiting for me to decide whether a drawing counted as a thing.

I held the page to the lamp. The ring at the bottom was not quite closed; the pen had lifted at the last moment, the way a hand does when it is tired. I thought about the dotted line as a path and the lotus as the only thing in the picture that stayed where it was drawn, rooted in its own dark water while the loops carried on without it. Decoration is what you call a thing when you have no paperwork for it.

I stamped the inside cover with the date, PASSED, and slid the book back across the counter. "Keep it open in the light," I said. He did, and the petals caught the bulb and seemed, for a moment, to unfold. Then he was through the gate and the coach pulled away with its lights on, and the dotted ring stayed on the counter where I had left it, closed now by my own thumbprint.