Black ink drawing of a symmetrical mandala design with leaf sprigs, dotted chains and droplet shapes, drawn on white paper with fine liner pens beside it.

Mandala design with leaves and dotted chains

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn mandala-style design in black ink on white paper, built from layered scalloped petals, arches and concentric rings. Leafy sprigs trail from the upper left and lower right, with dotted chains and small droplet shapes hanging below the central motif. Fine uniform linework is combined with stippled dots along the edges, and the image is entirely black and white.

Dotwork Fine line Mandala Leaves Dot Chain Droplet Paisley Floral ornament

Find an artist for this

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

Master Ishaq never let me touch the central rings until I could close a circle with one steady breath. For three winters I filled dots on the slate tiles while he sat with his pipe and watched me the way a heron watches a ditch. Every petal lobe took one neat punch of the bone awl, every ring had its own row, and when I rushed the chain of beads the whole border wobbled like a drunk at a wedding.

Keep reading

The commission came from the river merchants, who wanted a floor for the new bathhouse, a mandala of petals opening out from a single point. Ishaq drew it first on paper with a reed pen dipped in soot ink, and the leafy sprigs trailed from the corners the way ivy finds a gutter. He let me choose the droplets that hang beneath the cluster. I made them heavy, almost ready to fall, and he grunted, which from him was praise.

Then the fever took him in the month of frost. The merchants sent a clerk to measure the work, and I was left to finish the last quarter, the stippled edge where the pattern melts into the plaster. I pinned the paper to a board and worked alone, one dot at a time, counting under my breath the way he had taught me, until the light went blue across the page.

When the tiles were laid, the clerk walked the length of the bathhouse and stopped where the stipple thickens. He looked down, then up at me, and said nothing about the work. Ishaq had signed every piece with a single droplet hidden in the hem of a leaf. I had hidden mine in the same place, a little lower, where the fountain's spill would touch it first.