Black ink drawing of a symmetrical lotus mandala with dotwork shading and hanging dot-line drops, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Lotus mandala design with dotwork

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower sits at the centre of this drawing, with layered petals, a mandala-like inner pattern and a lattice of fine crosshatching. Dotwork stipple shades the petals, and dotted chains with teardrop ends hang below the flower and fall from a central vertical line. The design is drawn in black linework on a plain pale background, with no body part visible.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Lotus Mandala Flower Petal Dot Chain Teardrop Symmetry Ornament

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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 lotus had not flowered in nineteen years, and my aunt Marguerite still spoke to it every morning as though it owed her rent. She kept it in a tin bath sunk beside the glasshouse at Hollin Wood, a walled garden where nothing grew in a straight line except her opinions. I was sixteen that summer and given the job of topping up the water with a watering can that leaked from the spout.

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On the first Sunday of August she found a seed head split open in the mud, its pods laid out in rings like the rose window in the church at Alford. She made me sit on an upturned crate and count the cells with a pencil, one dot for each, while she drew the pattern on the back of a seed catalogue. Every petal had to match the one opposite it. If the left side sulked, the right side had to sulk in exactly the same way.

The drops came in September, when the nights turned cold enough for dew to bead along the leaf edges and hang there like loose beads from a broken necklace. Aunt Marguerite said the plant was only doing what it had always done, drawing water up its stalk and letting it fall wherever it liked. I thought she meant the lotus until she handed me the pencil and told me to finish the lower border myself.

The next morning the bath held a single bloom in the middle of the water, pale and perfectly balanced, and she was not there to see it. I left the plant alone and wrote down the count instead, every dot and every drop, so that whoever came after us would know exactly how many there had been.