Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo with a dangling fine line chain of stars, moons and diamonds on the inner forearm.

Lotus mandala with dangling stars on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower made of layered petals sits at the centre, with fine dotted shading and a small fleur-like motif in the middle. Below it, a fine line chain of dots, crescent moons, small stars and diamond shapes hangs down the forearm, ending in a single elongated diamond. The tattoo is in black ink only, with the dotwork texture creating soft grey tones against the skin.

Dotwork Botanical Fine line Forearm Lotus Mandala Star Crescent moon Diamond Chain Dot

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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 lamp-maker's daughter had been told never to hang anything from the lotus pond, and so of course she tied the last of the glass beads to a length of waxed thread the night before the frost. Her father found her on the boards at dawn, knees wet, a row of tiny moons and stars swinging from the rail like a curtain nobody had asked for. He did not scold her. He took the thread in his thick fingers and counted the beads one by one, as he counted every piece of glass that came through the workshop, and at the end there was one long dark diamond left over, the one he used for seeing into the kiln.

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He said the pond had been a village well once, before the water turned to lotus and the lotus turned to a kind of promise. He said that anything dropped into it came back up as something you could hold to the light. Then he showed her how to press the petals of the cold blooms flat with a thumbnail, so the dots would take the colour of the sky, and how to let the chain of beads run down toward the water until it touched and rang faintly, like a bell that had forgotten its tune.

The frost came. The lamps stayed lit all winter in the lower street, and nobody could say why the light fell on the cobbles in a pattern of crescents and small bright stars. The girl kept the diamond bead in her coat pocket. In spring, when the lotus opened again, she dropped it into the pond on purpose, and waited on the boards until the ripples were gone, and then a little longer, just in case.