Black ink pen drawing of an ornate mandala design with a central flower, teardrop motifs and leaf-like scrollwork on white paper, with faint pencil guidelines.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala design with flower and teardrop motifs

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn ornamental design shows a central radiating flower surrounded by layered petals, scrolls and dotted filler. Smaller flower and teardrop motifs trail along the outer edges, forming a triangular composition. The fine black pen linework is crisp and even, with dotted shading, and the faint pencil guide lines are still visible on the white paper.

Geometric Botanical Mandala Flower Teardrop Leaves Scroll Dot Paisley

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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

Dear Nadia, your sheet is still pinned above my bench, and the pencil ghosts all over it are staying where they are. I know you meant to rub them out before you left, but I have decided the honest part of a drawing is the part that shows how it was built. The compass arcs across the top, the centre flower with its eight fat petals, the little dots you put in threes between the scrolls. You worked outward from the middle the way my mother taught me, and you could still see the scaffolding if you looked.

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Mr Okafor from the print works came in on Thursday, saw it hanging by the window and asked whether it was a finished commission. I told him it was a working drawing, which is what it is. He leaned in close to the teardrops along the lower edge, the ones that trail like the fringe on the paisley shawls in the trunk upstairs, and said he could cut a block from it tomorrow. He did not ask about the pencil. I think he understood it perfectly well.

The windfalls from the old tree in the yard have started coming down on the sill, and the wasps have found them. Keep the sheet out of the damp. If you want to keep the centre flower, keep it exactly as it is, with the faint lines still running through the petals.

Bring the good pen on Saturday, the one with the cracked barrel. We will sit at the bench in the afternoon light and you can tell me which of the outer petals you would have made fatter, and I will tell you I would have left them thin.