Pen drawing of an ornamental tattoo design with a lotus-like top, a central heart and paisley-style scrolls, shown on paper beside two black pens.

Ornamental lotus and heart design drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of a symmetrical ornamental design, with a pointed lotus-like motif above a central heart and a fine scrolled band extending to either side. The linework is fine and dense, with stippled and hatched shading that gives the leaves and heart depth. The design is rendered in black ink on white paper, with two black pens lying across the composition.

Lotus Heart Paisley Mandala Scroll Filigree

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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 lace-maker's daughter in Pellamy Row had the steadiest hand in the parish, and everyone knew it, which was why the widow Okonedo came knocking on the second morning of frost with a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. Inside was a sheet of paper so fine it showed the grain of the table beneath it. Her husband had drawn it, she said, before the fever took him. A lotus, a heart, and a band of scrollwork that curled out like the tendrils of a bean vine. He had never finished it. She wanted it finished.

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Nell worked by the window for six nights with a pen she had bought from a man on the canal barge, pressing dots into the leaves until her wrist ached and the ink dried on her cuffs. She stippled the petals, then hatched the heart until it seemed to hold a small dark weather of its own. Where the paper was thin she went slowly. Where the scrolls ran long she counted under her breath, the way her mother had taught her to count stitches.

On the seventh morning she laid the drawing out and found she could not leave it. The lotus wanted one more point at its crown, a seed or a flame, she could not decide which. So she sat with the pen above the paper and waited, until the widow's cart rattled up outside and the frost on the glass began to melt into beads. Nell set the nib down, drew the small tip of the spire, and signed nothing at all. Some things, she thought, were better left for the one who had begun them to recognise.