Black line drawing of a mandala-style lotus flower framed by curling leaf vines, with stippled dotwork shading, drawn on white paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala lotus with dotwork and leaf vines

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a layered, symmetrical lotus or mandala flower with a central circle and petal shapes. Two curling leaf vines sweep across the top and bottom corners, and stippled dotwork shading fills the areas behind the petals. The drawing is monochrome and centred on a sheet of white paper.

Dotwork Botanical Geometric Mandala Lotus Flower Leaf Vine Petal Circle 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 ferry no longer came to Skerrin after the November gales, so the widow Ailsa Brannock rowed her husband's boat across the sound herself, with a basket of smoked mackerel and a letter she had been carrying in her coat for a month. The mainland harbourmaster read the letter twice and then gave her a cup of tea without a word, which she thought kind of him.

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The letter was for her sister Morag, who had married a potter in Lerwick and had not written in six winters. Ailsa had never learned to read a lot of things people wanted her to read, but she could read a lotus, and the old women on Skerrin had taught her that a flower drawn in a ring of petals meant a door left open. She had drawn one on the back of the letter, petal over petal, with a circle at its heart, and round it she had made the dots like salt on a fish, to show where the wind had been.

Morag came down to the slip in her apron, flour to the elbows. She looked at the drawing for a long time, and then at the two curling leaves Ailsa had drawn reaching out from either side, the way ivy climbs a wall when nobody is watching it.

"You always were a poor writer," Morag said, and took the paper from her hand.

Ailsa stayed for supper. The boat went home on the morning tide with the basket empty and the letter folded small inside her shawl, and when she passed the Skerrin headland she saw a lamp burning in the window of the old house, which had been dark for six winters.