Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo with fine scrolling linework on the forearm, near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A photograph of a tattoo on a forearm showing a symmetrical lotus-style mandala with pointed petals, a dotted central medallion and curling scrolls that rise up the arm. The design uses stippled dotwork shading and fine black linework, with a small dotted bead at the top of the vertical stem. The ink is black and grey throughout, shown against a pale background with a hand visible below the tattoo.

Dotwork Botanical Fine line Forearm Lotus Mandala Scroll Floral ornament Dot

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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 officer at the Harrow Lane crossing holds your pattern up to the strip light and turns it slowly, the way a jeweller turns a stone. It is only tracing paper folded into quarters, but someone has pricked it all over with a pin, thousands of pinholes that glow where the light gets through. Along the top edge a single larger hole sits by itself, like a bead on a thread. "Is this a drawing?" he asks. "It's a stencil," you say, which is true enough.

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You do not tell him about the winter your uncle Dragan spent at the kitchen table, tapping charcoal dust through these holes with a rolled cloth until the lotus bloomed in black on a sheet of card. He kept saying the scrolls needed a steadier hand. He never let anyone else touch the cloth. When spring came he folded the design into the inside pocket of his good coat, where it stayed, soft at the creases, until the day he pressed it into your hands without a word and went back to the ferries.

The officer runs a gloved thumb along the perforated petals and frowns at the dotted medallion in the centre, the rows of tiny holes that make the circle look almost like a sea. "Very careful work," he says. He does not ask who made it. He asks only whether anything else is folded inside, and you shake your head, and he hands it back with the same care he would give a child's drawing.