Black and grey lotus mandala tattoo with dotwork shading on the upper arm, shown beside a pink top and black bra.

Lotus mandala on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus flower sits at the centre of a mandala-style design, with layered petals, scrolled details and dotted trailing lines. The linework is fine and the shading is built up with stippled dots, giving the petals depth. The design is in black and grey ink and is framed against skin, with a pink top and black bra visible at the edge of the photo.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Lotus Mandala Flower Petal Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pricking card had been on the kitchen table since Tuesday, and Edie had not yet found the nerve to finish it. Her mother's hand had made the first rows, small neat holes punched through card with a pin so fine it left only a dot of shadow when held to the window. Lotus, her mother had called it, though the design had come from a sampler folded at the bottom of a drawer in Sneinton, older than either of them, and nobody living could say who had drawn it first.

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Edie worked the pins through in the evenings, after the mill whistle, while the gas ring hissed under the kettle. Each petal was a ring of dots, and each dot had to sit exactly where its neighbour told it to, or the curve would lose its nerve. Her mother had taught her that the pattern lived in the holes and not in the lines between them, so you could look at a finished length of Nottingham lace and see the dots first, a fine grey cloud, and only then the flower rising out of it.

On the Thursday, Mr Harrod from the warehouse came up the stairs with a bolt of ivory net under his arm and a request. The firm wanted the lotus for a christening gown. He wanted it simplified, the scrolls cut back, the trailing dots taken out so the bobbins would move faster. Edie said nothing while he talked. When he had gone she took the card down, laid it over the window, and counted the holes in the centre flower. Nineteen, the number her mother always said kept a pattern from coming apart.

She did not cut the trailing dots. She sat up until the kettle was cold and worked the hem of the gown herself, one slow pair of bobbins at a time, and when the lamp was low the light came through the card and threw a faint lotus on the wall, dotted and whole, the way it had always looked from the other side.