Black dotwork lotus mandala tattoo with fine red dotted guide lines across the forearm, set against a purple towel.

Lotus mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large lotus flower sits inside a layered mandala-style ring on the forearm, drawn in fine black linework with stippled dot shading. Faint red dotted lines radiate outward from the design, adding a small amount of colour to the mostly black composition. The flower is centred on the arm with the petals, lace-like inner ring and dotted accents filling the frame against a purple background.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Mandala Dot Line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, Mother has finally posted the pattern book back from Rochdale, and I have spent three evenings at the kitchen table with a pot of Indian ink and a ruler, trying to make a lotus sit still on the page. It will not. Every petal wants to be a doily and every doily wants to be a flower, and Mr Pilling at the chemist's says that is the trouble with anything worth looking at.

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The sketch I am sending is the one Dad pinned above the mangle. I pricked the dots with a darning needle so the lines would show through, then ran red cotton between the pinholes, thirty-two of them, from the rim out to the edge of the paper, because the hall clock needed something to keep it company. You will laugh, but when I lifted the cotton the whole thing looked as though it was breathing out.

Mrs Haworth came into the shop on Thursday wanting a christening shawl, and when she saw the drawing she asked who had designed the flower in the middle. I said nobody had. It had simply come up through the lace the way a root comes up through a garden path. She bought two yards of the cream silk on the spot and asked for the dots to be left off, which I have not yet forgiven her for.

I am keeping the red thread. Tell Edie I still owe her a bobbin, and that the lotus, whatever Mother says, is only a doily that has learned to open. Write soon, and do not let the kettle boil dry while you read this. Your loving sister, June.