Black ink drawing of a symmetrical lotus mandala design with dotwork shading and fine line petals, drawn on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala design with dotwork detail

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower sits at the centre of the drawing, with a layered mandala of petals, leaves and pointed motifs extending outwards and upwards. The linework is fine and fluid, with the inner petals shaded by hatching and the outer areas filled with stippled dots and scrollwork. The design is drawn in black ink on pale paper with a plain, centred composition.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Mandala Flower Petal Leaves Ornament Scrollwork Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold your cup still and mind the gull, it has its eye on your biscuit. Down on Scald Quay, where the gutters run into the harbour and the harbour runs out past the bar, there was a paper-seller called Ada Penhallow who sold drawing paper and ships' charts and nothing else. She kept a pen with a fine nib and a habit of drawing on the backs of everything.

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One wet March a pilot named Joss Varley came in with a chart so creased it looked like a cabbage. The bar had shifted in the winter gales. Three boats had gone aground on it that month, and the Harbour Board men were talking about dredging, which cost money nobody had. Joss wanted the channel marked again, and he wanted it marked by someone who had sat by the still water at the head of the creek and looked properly.

Ada did not mark the channel. She sat up all night with the lamp turned low and drew a lotus. Its petals opened in the same fan the shoal made, the inner leaves shaded with close hatching where the mud ran deep, the outer ones stippled with dots where the sand lay thin. She filled the scrollwork with tight little whorls that, when you held the sheet up to the window, matched the bends of the creek. Nobody in the town believed a flower could tell a pilot where to steer, and she did not argue with them.

Joss took it out on the morning ebb, folded inside his oilskin. He came back at dusk with a basket of mackerel and an unbroken hull. He said the dots had sat exactly over the sand, and the petals had pointed the way between them. Ada kept the sheet on her counter until the damp got into it. Her grandson has it framed now, creased down the middle where the stem runs, and when the boats come in on the tide he still sets it facing the window.