Two forearms show matching black and grey tattoos: a shaded lotus with dotted line detail on the upper arm and a geometric mandala on the lower forearm.

Matching lotus and mandala forearm tattoos

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two forearms are shown side by side, one with a shaded lotus flower and a trailing dotted line, and the other with a symmetrical mandala of layered petals and fine ornamental patterns. The linework is crisp and the shading uses soft gradients and stippled dots. The ink is black and grey, and the pieces are framed against a paved ground.

Geometric Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Dotted line Geometric pattern Petal

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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 leaves Kell at six, and by half past you have already decided the lotus is wrong. Your sister says the petals open like a clock face, that you can count the hours in them, but you have spent three winters on the sea wall with a pencil and a pair of dividers, and the petals you draw come out as compass roses. Mother kept her notebook under the chapel bell. Nobody on Kell ever opened it but you.

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The notebook is full of mandalas. Each one is the harbour seen from above, the slipway a spoke, the breakwater a ring of petals, the lobster pots stippled in tiny dots like salt on a loaf. In the last one, drawn in a hand that shook at the edges, she had marked a single dotted line trailing off the outer ring towards the mainland, and beside its end she had written only: follow when the tide is out.

You wait for the spring low. The causeway shows its stones, grey and wet, and you walk it with the notebook inside your jumper, counting dots under your breath. At the far end there is a mooring post no one has used since the war, and tied to it a tin box the size of a bread loaf. Inside, wrapped in oilcloth, is a second notebook, and on its first page, drawn in fine black ink, a second lotus, identical to the first but turned a quarter round, so that its petals fit the gaps in yours.

You sit on the wet stones and lay the two books side by side. Put together, the drawings close into one enormous mandala, and in the centre, where the petals meet, there is a small empty circle waiting for a name. You take the pencil from behind your ear and write your sister's name in it, then you walk back across the causeway before the sea remembers it was ever a road.