Black ink lotus flower mandala tattoo with dotwork petals and curling swirls on a person's upper chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on the chest

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a stylised lotus flower with symmetrical petals, dotted fill and curling swirls, with small diamond and dot accents extending outward from the centre. The linework is bold and even, with dotwork detail inside the petals. The tattoo sits centrally on the upper chest against smooth skin, and the frame is cropped close around it.

Botanical Dotwork Chest Lotus Flower Mandala Dot Swirl Diamond

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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 frost came down on the Hallam farm the week the cattle were brought in, and by the first of December every pane in the dairy had grown the same flower. My mother said it was the cold drawing on the glass, but she had her own pencil for the job, and she used it on the backs of the feed merchant's invoices while the kettle worked itself up to a boil.

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She never drew a lotus. She called them lilies, though nothing on our land had ever opened like that. Petals in a ring, a swirl curling off each stem, a dot in every petal for the seed, and two little diamonds pushed out from the middle as if someone had dropped them there. She drew one each night after the milking, and by February the drawer under the Aga held forty of them, soft at the corners.

The winter she went into hospital in Carlisle, I took the pencil. The byre was colder than the house and my fingers would not hold it, so I breathed on the dairy window and traced the petals in the condensation instead. The frost came back over my lines by morning, and the diamonds filled in where I had missed them, the same shape my mother had been making all along.

When she came home in March she didn't look at the drawings. She stood at the window with her hand on the sill and counted the dots out loud, one to eight, the way she used to count the cows through the gate. Then she took my pencil and added one more dot to the last petal, the one I had left empty, and said that was where the seed would go.