Black and grey mandala tattoo with dotwork shading and lotus-style petals across the centre of a chest, worn under a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala and lotus chest tattoo

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A large symmetrical mandala design covers the centre of the chest, built from layered lotus petals, a central radial medallion and leafy sprigs. The linework is fine and the shading is built up with stippled dots, giving depth to the petals and background. The image is in black and grey, with the tattoo framed by a black garment and the upper body cropped out of frame.

Dotwork Geometric Chest Mandala Lotus Flower Leaves Medallion

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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

Sit down, all of you, and mind the lamp. No, not that one, the brass one with the cracked glass. The Marigold had been eleven weeks out of Madras when the wind died, and I mean died. The sails hung like wet washing and the sea went flat as a pewter plate. Men start talking nonsense in a calm. Old Tobias Quill swore the water was breathing.

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Then the cook, a quiet Goan lad called Anselm, came up from the galley with a bowl of rice water and a look on his face. He'd been dotting the bottom of a pan with a sail needle, he said, and the pattern had come out right, round and round, petals inside petals like the lotus on his mother's shrine. He showed us the pan. Every dot sat in its place. Nobody had taught him the sum of it.

Captain Hale did not believe in signs, but he believed in a good dinner, and he let Anselm sketch the thing on the chart table, a wheel of little points at the middle and a crown of leaves around the outside. Lay your finger on the centre, the boy said, and the wind will know where you are. Hale laughed, and then he stopped laughing, because the tallow lamp had gone out of its own accord and the pencil mark was still warm.

The wind came up at four bells, from the north-east, straight as a ruled line. We limped into Bristol fourteen days later with torn sails and the chart still pinned to the table. Anselm never drew another thing on a ship. He said a pattern like that wants a steady hand and a quiet sea, and we had given him neither.

So when you see a lotus drawn on the wall of some tattooist's shop, you'll know it's the same flower. Mind the lamp.