Black and grey drawing of a symmetrical mandala tattoo design with a central flower, leaves and dotwork, shown on cream paper with no body placement.

Mandala flower design in black and grey

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A circular mandala design built around a layered central flower with pointed petals and a star-like core. Outer rings contain scalloped borders, small leaves, and rows of solid dots, drawn with fine ink lines and soft grey shading. The design is centred on a plain cream background with even margins on all sides.

Dotwork Geometric Botanical Mandala Flower Leaves Dot Petal Star Scallop

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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 pattern had to be pricked again, because the pins in Mrs Ashdown's card had rusted and bent the holes out of true. Hannah sat by the window with the paper on her knee and a bradawl in her fist, counting outward from the centre the way her mother had taught her: eight holes for the first ring, sixteen for the second, then the awkward nineteen that never seemed to sit right in the scallops.

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Her mother had always said to start at the middle, where everything hangs from one point, but the star at the heart of this one would not be done first. The eight points had to be worked last, after the petals and the leaves had given the threads somewhere to rest. Hannah pricked the outer border instead, row after row of tiny holes that would become the knots of the dots, and let the centre wait in its own dark.

The bobbins clicked through the night like a slow clock. Somewhere past two she tied off the last leaf and found her fingers had stopped shaking, which had not happened since the funeral. Mrs Ashdown's grandson would be christened in the morning, and the shawl had to be lifted off the pillow before the light came up.

She eased it away with a crochet hook, pinched the star into shape, and held the lace up to the lamp. Its shadow spread across the cream wall, every scallop and leaf accounted for, the centre bright and exact. It looked less like something she had made than something that had always been there, waiting for someone patient enough to find the holes.