Black ink line drawing of a symmetrical lotus mandala design with dotted detail and striped petal outlines, drawn as tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala tattoo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower drawn in black ink on a white background, with layered petals outlined in hatched and dotted lines. The centre holds a teardrop motif with small leaf shapes and concentric circles, with a column of dots running vertically above and below. The design is drawn in fine uniform linework with no shading or colour, arranged to be read as a single centred piece.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Lotus Mandala Flower Petal Dot Leaves

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

My uncle Tobias painted the tiles for every kitchen in Porthlow, and he never drew a petal before he had folded the paper in half. The fold was the whole trick, he said. Whatever you put on the left had to answer on the right, or the sea would find the flaw and tell everyone in the Crown.

Keep reading

The summer I was sixteen, the widow Penrose ordered a splashback for her scullery with a lotus at its centre, because her husband had brought the seeds back from Ceylon in a jar and they had never flowered. Uncle gave me the commission. I sat at the bench under the window with a fine nib and a pot of ink, drew the outer petals first, hatched their edges so the light would catch them, then dotted the bands between, one dot for every breath the harbour bell took. The bell rang in threes. I counted nine hundred and six dots before I looked up.

When I did, the tide was out and the boats lay on their sides in the mud like sleeping dogs. Uncle stood behind me with his hands in his apron. He didn't say the drawing was good. He ran a thumb down the column of dots I'd set above the centre and below it, and said, 'You've left the bottom open. Close it, or it's just a flower going nowhere.'

I closed it. The last dot met the stem of the teardrop, and the whole thing sat still on the paper like something that had decided to stay. The tile went up in October. The widow still keeps it on her wall, and on Sundays she wipes it down with a cloth, the dots turned towards the water.