Black and grey lotus flower design with mandala patterns, dotwork shading and hanging diamond pendants, printed on a white backing in clear packaging.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala design with dotwork

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A lotus flower is drawn at the centre with layered petals, leaf motifs and ornate mandala-style inner patterns. Fine linework outlines the petals, while stippled dotwork shades the base and dotted lines fall from the bloom to small diamond-shaped pendants. The design is shown in black and grey on a white square backing, held inside a clear plastic sleeve.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Mandala Leaves Dotted line Diamond Pendant

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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

Sit closer, the lamp is only good for three more stories and I mean to get my money's worth from it. You want the one about the lotus-woman of the high pass, the one who wove strings of little silver stones from her hair? No, that is the other one. This is the one about Sabira Koyuncu, who kept the tea hut below the Kesik pass and could not abide a thing that was not finished properly.

Keep reading

She had a brass dish of dotted lines she used for drawing patterns on the wall of her hut, every petal layered over the last, the leaves turning back on themselves like a sleeve being rolled up. Travellers paid her in coins and she paid them back in pastry. One winter a surveyor came up from the valley with a leather case full of papers and asked her to mark the boundary stones with tokens. She drew a lotus on each token, its petals packed tight as a fist, and hung a little diamond under every bloom on a string of dots. The surveyor laughed and said nobody would ever read such fussy work. Sabira said the dots were not for reading. They were for counting the days a man could walk before he lost his way.

He did lose his way, that spring, somewhere past the third stone, and it was the dots that brought him back down. He followed them the way a child follows a trail of crumbs, one diamond to the next, until the snow ran out and the valley lamps appeared below him like coins dropped in a well.

So when they tell you the pass is cursed, remember it was only ever badly counted.