Black dotwork and line lotus mandala tattoo centred on the upper back, with small dots scattered around the outer petals.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala on the upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus flower with layered petals sits at the centre of the frame, outlined in solid black linework. Inner petals and the central motif are filled with stippled dots that shade them from dark to lighter grey, and small dots are placed around the outer edges. The skin around the design is plain, and the image is shot straight on, so the whole motif is evenly framed.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Mandala Petal Dot Flower

Find an artist for this

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 clockmaker's widow had left the instructions in pencil on the back of a bus ticket, and Teodor read them twice before he trusted himself to touch the brass. Each petal, she'd written, must be counted before it is opened. Seventeen outer, nine within, one at the heart that does not turn. He laid the pieces out on the green baize in the order the pattern demanded, and the room smelled of machine oil and the wet wool of his coat.

Keep reading

By midnight the lamp had burned down to a blue bead and he had only reached the eleventh petal. The stippled dots of the old mechanism, the tiny pits where someone had punched the brass by hand, looked to him now less like decoration than like a count kept by a patient person in the dark. He began to suspect the dots were not ornament at all but a record of every hour the lotus had been wound and left unfinished. The ring of little stars at the edge of the casing, he noticed, had never once been polished.

At ten past one he lifted the central piece, the one the widow had called the still petal, and it did not turn. He pressed it, then breathed on it, then pressed harder, and felt the whole flower exhale under his fingers, nineteen leaves unfolding in a slow, exact order. Somewhere behind the wall a bell began to strike, not one o'clock but the hour she had written at the bottom of the ticket, which was tomorrow's.