Black dotwork lotus mandala tattoo across the wrist and back of a hand, with fine linework petals and dot shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on the back of hand

Dotwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus flower sits at the centre of a mandala-style design, with layered petals, leaves and a pointed base. Fine black linework outlines the forms, while stippled dots create shading in the petals and lower sections. The design is in black ink only and spreads from the wrist up toward the forearm, with thin stems and small star-like accents around the edges.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Hand Lotus Mandala Flower Leaves Petal Dot Stem

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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

Hush now, the lamp has oil for one more tale, so you'll have to let me tell it slow. Mind the rope, Tomasz, that's only seawater coming under the hatch, not a ghost. The mate wants the lotus story again, the one about the chart-maker's girl, and I've told him she's been asleep at the bottom of the Indian Ocean long enough to deserve some peace.

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Her father, Edwin Pelling, drew charts for the Harwich packets and never got a coast right on the first pencil. What he did get right was the compass rose. He inked it with a single crow quill, working the dots in close as sand, and at its heart he set a lotus, because his wife had grown up among water-lilies in a courtyard by the river and he could not bear to leave her out of the sea. Every petal had a thin stem running down to a point, and every stem pointed at a true bearing. Ada knew that. She had watched him count the dots with his lips moving.

The Marigold lay becalmed for nineteen days off the Line, her sails hanging like wet washing and the water in the casks going green. The men quarrelled over the last of the biscuit. The captain wanted a sum that would not come out. On the twentieth morning Ada crawled onto the deck with a stub of chalk and copied the rose on the planks, stem by stem, and when she reached the lowest point of the flower she saw that her father's drop-shaped base was not a drop at all. It was an arrow, its fletching hidden in the stippling, and it pointed south-east, where the trade wind waits.

The captain steered that way without asking me or anyone else. By dusk the sails filled. He asked who had found it, and Ada, who was eleven and had been sick for most of the calm, said the flower did, and went below to sleep.