Black ink lotus mandala design with ornate dotwork patterns and dots above and below, drawn as a flash sheet with no placement shown.

Lotus mandala design with dot accents

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower built from layered petals, each filled with detailed mandala-style patterns of scrolls, scallops, leaves and small circles. Fine linework outlines the shapes, and stippled dots shade the centre and petal edges. The design is set on a plain white background, with a vertical line of dots above and below the flower and additional dots at either side.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Mandala Flower Dot Petal Leaves

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

The Queen of Ysmer wanted her lotus painted on the water gate before the monsoon, and she wanted it finished by my hand, not the hands of the guild. I was twenty-two and had only ever painted lids for spice jars in the market of Halvane. So I climbed the scaffold with a pot of ink made from burnt walnut shell and a brush of goat hair, and I began at the centre, where every mandala begins, with a small sun.

Keep reading

Each petal I filled with the patterns my grandmother taught me: scallops for rain, scrolls for the river's turning, little rings like the eyes of fish that never sleep. Old Tamsin, who ground the ink, watched me from the courtyard and said nothing for three days. On the fourth she climbed up with a cup of barley tea and pointed at the outer petals. 'You've left the edges plain,' she said. 'The river gets into the edges. That is where the dots go.'

So I stippled the rims with a single hair dipped in ink, one dot at a time, until the petals looked as though they were breathing mist. A sailor from the eastern boats stopped below to watch and asked what the flower was for. I told him it was a door that did not open, only a place to stand and look. He laughed and said the Queen would never pay for a door like that.

She did pay, in silver and in a seat on the council. When the rains came, the dots on either side of the flower ran with water and trickled down the wall in a line, like a path back to the ground. Tamsin said the ink would outlast the gate. I hope she is right, though I think of those walnut dots more often than I think of the Queen's silver.