Black ornamental lotus design with layered petals, fine dotted detailing and a vertical line of dots above and below, drawn in a botanical dotwork style on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental lotus design with dots

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical black line drawing of a lotus flower with layered, pointed petals filled with fine dotted and hatched ornamentation. A vertical column of dots sits above and below the flower, centred on the design. The artwork is in black on a plain white background, with dense detail concentrated in the central petals and a lighter outline on the outer petals.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Mandala Petal Dot Ornament

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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

Mrs Okonedo had punched the same lotus into card for thirty-one years, and she could tell from the sound of the machine whether the hole had gone through clean. Hers was the last pair of hands at Pell and Sons on Cromford Street that still cut the Jacquard cards by eye, the lace men said, though she never looked up from her bench when they said it.

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The pattern had come down from London in 1958 on a sheet of squared paper so old it had gone the colour of weak tea. Nobody at the mill knew who had drawn it. Its petals folded inward like the petals of a real flower, and between the tiers ran a column of tiny punched dots, one above and one below, that the designers called the spine. Every card needed exactly forty-two holes in that column, and if one went missing the whole run came off the frames crooked.

In March the spine went wrong. Someone had cut it at forty-one, and the lace came out with a gap in the centre of every bloom, like a missing tooth. Mrs Okonedo took the stack home on the 7.15 bus and counted the holes by lamplight with a magnifier and a cup of cooling tea. She found the fault on card nineteen, a small wobble of the punch, and beside it, in pencil on the back, a smudged mark that was not her own.

She knew the hand. Ivor Pell had cut cards before the war, and his initials sat in the corner of the old sheet. She sat at the kitchen table until the bus timetable on the wall stopped making sense, then fetched her own punch from the drawer, and cut the missing dot into card nineteen, the size of a pinhead, exactly where the lotus needed to breathe.