Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo with hanging drops on the inner forearm, shown beside its printed stencil.

Lotus mandala tattoo on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower sits at the centre of a mandala-style design, with layered petals, a central eye motif and a curved flower stem above. Fine linework and stippled dotwork shading create the petal detail, and thin lines with diamond and teardrop drops hang beneath the bloom. The tattoo is in black and grey ink on the inner forearm, with the matching stencil on paper beside it.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Drop Diamond Stencil

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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 tracing paper came off the roll every Tuesday, and Dorota Okafor cut each sheet at her kitchen table with scissors she kept sharp for nothing else. She was seventy-one and would not let me touch the stencil fluid. What I was allowed was the drying: fanning the sheets over the boiler pipe until the grey lines went black and clean.

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The lotus was her own, copied from a plaster ceiling rose in the church hall where she had married Stan in 1968. Its petals sat layered like a shut fan, and at the centre was an eye she had traced so many times that the paper there had gone thin as skin. The drops were the part she fussed over. Each one was a small diamond, then a teardrop with a ring through it, hung on hair-fine lines she drew against a steel ruler while holding her breath.

A lad came in one spring wanting it done by Friday, and she sent him away with a flat no and a week's wait. When he came back he brought his own sketch, crumpled, and she laughed at it until he laughed too. She gave him the stencil she had made for him, then folded the original sheet into the pocket of her apron, the one with the worn eye.

That night I held it up to the window. The light came through the thin centre of the eye the way it comes through a pupil in a dark room, and she told me, without looking up from her scissors, that it was the only part of the design she had never once needed to draw twice.