Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo with a dangling leaf and dot motif, placed centrally on the chest between the sternum and the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala tattoo on the sternum

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lotus flower built from layered petals, with a central mandala-style motif of dots and scalloped detail. The design is rendered in fine black linework with dense stippled dotwork shading that gives the petals depth. A small dot sequence rises above the flower and a sprig of leaves hangs below, framed by two knitted textile panels.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Lotus Mandala Leaf Dot Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third winter the lake did not freeze, and Ysolde Marrin walked out onto it at dusk with a lantern and a knitting bag, because the reeve had said she was lying about the flower.

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She had not lied. Under the black water, where the ice should have been, a lotus lay open on the surface, neat as a chart her grandmother had worked out in wool, each petal stacked on the next like the scales of a fish. Ysolde knelt on the bank and counted. Seven rings of petals, a heart of tiny beads, and above it, rising from the stillness, seven dots set in a line, the way the old women marked the days of thaw on the church door.

The reeve came at first light with two guards and a coil of rope. He stood at the reed line and saw what she had seen: from the flower's stalk hung a sprig of leaves, dripping, their veins drawn fine as hair. He reached for it, and the lake went cold and still under his boots, and he sat down in the mud without meaning to.

"It keeps what is given back," Ysolde said, and that was all she ever said about it. She cut one leaf with her grandmother's scissors, wrapped it in grey wool, and carried it home. By morning the lake had frozen solid and the flower lay buried under a skin of ice, but the frost on her kitchen window had grown a lotus, seven petals to a side and seven dots above it, exactly as the water had drawn it.