Black and grey lotus mandala tattoo with a dotted line below it on the inner forearm, above a brown leather watch strap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lotus flower with layered mandala-style petals is tattooed on the inner forearm, with a short vertical row of dots beneath it. The work uses fine black linework and grey shading, with no colour ink. The tattoo sits centre frame against a pale cream sleeve and a stone wall, with a faint tattoo partly visible on the side of the torso.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Ribs Lotus Mandala 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 pond behind Hollin Court had not held a lotus in forty years, so when Tess came back from the Saturday market with a bundle of roots wrapped in wet newspaper, you told her she was daft. She only shrugged, knelt at the water's edge and pressed the knobbled things into the silt with her bare hands, the way her nan had taught her on a Kent allotment. You stood over her with your flask going cold and said nothing else, because you had been wrong about plants before and liked her for not minding.

Keep reading

The first summer the leaves came up curled like wet paper, and you checked them every morning before the kettle, thumb pressed to the underside of each one. Nothing. Then in July a single pale leaf unrolled flat, and its veins ran out from the centre in lines so fine you needed your reading glasses to follow them. Tess drew the pattern on the back of a seed packet that night: rings of petals inside petals, each layer cut like the ironwork on the orangery gate. Under the flower she set a short column of dots, one for every stem she could count from the bank. "Seeds," she said. "Or the days we kept it." You did not ask which.

In August the letter came from the solicitors. The Court was sold, the pond would be filled in before Michaelmas, and the new owners wanted a car park where the water had been. You said nothing to Tess for a whole afternoon. That night the two of you lifted the roots by torchlight, slid them into buckets, and carried them up the lane in the rain to the old allotment behind the chapel, where the soil was black and nobody locked the gate.

By October the lotus had found its feet in a stone trough beside the shed. One bud was still open at dawn, and the rain on its petals had gathered into little rings that shook and spilled whenever a wren landed on the rim. You crouched and counted the dots on the seedhead the way you counted everything now, and got to twelve before the light changed.