Black dotwork and fine line lotus mandala tattoo across the inner wrist and lower forearm, with a hand visible below.

Lotus mandala tattoo on the wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A symmetrical lotus and mandala design sits across the wrist and rises up the forearm, with petals, leaves, a central bloom and trailing tendrils. The linework is fine and sharp, and the petals and outer ring are built up with stippled dotwork shading. The design is entirely black ink on a pale skin tone, set against a plain grey wall.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Leaves Dot Tendril

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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 master would not let me use a ruler on the lotus. Keep the hand loose, he said, and let the point do the counting. So for a whole summer I sat on the cool step of the workshop in Memphis, pricking tiny dots into a limestone slab with a copper needle, while the stonecutters argued about the price of ochre behind me.

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Every morning the flower opened on the slab before the heat came in. I learned the petals first, then the leaves that ran outward like the spokes of a cart wheel, then the little seed-dish at the heart that Ankhhor said must be shaded so dark it looked wet. He made me stipple the outer ring until my shoulders burned, dot after dot, the way the river lays down silt, so slowly you cannot see it happening until the whole thing is grey.

When the slab was finished the priests came to bless it and found a fault. A single dot sat below the bloom, a little apart from the rest, with a thread drawn down to it like a plumb line. Ankhhor scowled and asked who had done that. I said nothing, because I had put it there on purpose, the way a man signs a wall he has built. It was the only thing on the whole floor that was mine, and the priests walked over it every morning for the next forty years without once looking down.