Black fine line lotus mandala tattoo with ornate petal detailing on the side of a person's ribs, below the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala tattoo on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small black lotus-style mandala sits on the side of the torso, just below the upper arm. The petals are outlined in fine lines and filled with dotted and scrolled ornamental detail, with a central bloom and smaller rosette shapes at each side. The tattoo is shown in black ink on warm skin, centred in a close, soft-focus frame with long dark hair at the edge.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Lotus Mandala Ornament Flower Petal

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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

Mrs Ada Penrose had pricked lace patterns for thirty-one years, and she could tell a bad design from across the room by the way the dots sat on the card. So when the carrier's boy brought her a folded sheet with a flower drawn on it, she unfolded it at the window and frowned at the petals.

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It was a lotus, or what a sailor's wife had told her was a lotus, copied out by a ship's cook who had seen one only once, in a glass jar in Bombay. Every petal was ringed with a fine line, and inside each line someone had scattered dots, then little curled scrolls like fern heads, then rosettes at the sides that looked like cut paper. Ada had never seen a pattern so crowded and yet so sure of itself.

She spent a week trying to prick it onto card. Each time the dots drifted, and each time the scroll ran into the wrong petal. On the Saturday she gave up and walked down to the orchard behind the vicarage, where the late plums were splitting on the branches and wasps drank at the bruises. She sat under the old Bramley and tried again with a stub of pencil, drawing straight onto her knee.

The pattern came then, quick as breath, because she stopped trying to make it match the drawing and let her hand follow the dots already in her head. When she walked home the sheet was gone from her apron pocket, and in its place was a single fallen plum, wrapped in a dock leaf and still warm from the sun. She never did prick the card. She kept the plum on the windowsill until it shrivelled, and the lace she made that autumn had a lotus at its heart that no one in the parish could copy.