Black dotwork and fine line lotus mandala tattoo on the inner forearm, with dotted lines hanging below the flower.

Lotus mandala on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower sits at the centre of a symmetrical mandala, with layered petals, a lace-like geometric border and a row of dotted lines that curve down beneath it. The linework is fine and crisp, and the patterned fills are built from small dots and hatching in black ink only. The design is centred on the inner forearm and photographed straight on against a plain background.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Dot Lace pattern Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House had been broken since March, so Ada carried the bucket up nine floors every morning, water slopping on the concrete stairs. Mr Okonedo on the fourth floor said the seed had come from a market stall in Peckham, wrapped in a damp sock, and that a lotus would never take in a council flat. Ada said nothing. She set the bucket on the balcony rail where the sun reached for an hour after noon, and she waited.

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The first leaf came up in June, round and flat, with a line of dew beaded along its edge like the dots the old women drew beneath a finished pattern. Then a second leaf, and a third, each folded more finely than the last. The estate men came to look and went away again. A boy from the ninth floor sat on the bin store wall and counted the rings of the petals as they opened, until his mother shouted for him to come in for tea.

By August the stem had reached the height of the railings and the bud was tight as a fist. The council sent a letter about pots on balconies. Ada wrote back that it was not a pot but a river in a tin, and folded the letter into a boat for the boy. When the flower finally opened one cool morning, its layers were stacked like the lace round the lift shaft, darkest where the light fell hardest, and the water from the roof tank dripped down past it in a row of small, patient drops.

Ada watched it from the rail until the light went. The next morning the boy was waiting at the bottom of the stairs with a bucket of his own, and behind him came Mr Okonedo with a sack of soil on his shoulder, grumbling that a lotus would never take. They carried the water up together, nine floors, one step at a time, and by the autumn there were seven flowers on the balconies of Carrow House, each one opening at a different hour of the day.