Black ink drawing of an ornamental lotus flower with dotwork shading and hanging beaded details, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental lotus flower design in black ink

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower drawn in black ink on white paper, with layered petals filled with paisley-like curls, scallops and small dots. The central petal uses stippled dotwork shading, while the outer petals and the hanging chains of circles are outlined in clean, even linework. The composition is centred and fills the frame, with the beaded drops at the top and bottom balancing the design.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Flower Mandala Petal Leaves Bead Dot Paisley

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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 ink ran out on the third night of the cold snap, so I took the biro from the hook in the lambing shed and drew on the back of a feed invoice, the way Grandad always did when the wind got into the house. Hollin Bank sat under four feet of drifted snow that January, and every morning the ewes had to be dug out of the drifts with the shovel and a bucket of warm water.

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Grandad's lotuses lived in the margins of every ledger on the farm. Petals layered like the scales of a trout, curls folded inside curls, little dots pressed so close together they went grey. He said the dots were for the nights we had got through, and the chains of beads hanging from the bottom were for the ones still to come. I thought it was daft until the year his hands shook too much to lift the bucket, and the drawings grew smaller and tighter, as if he was trying to fit the whole winter onto one sheet.

This morning I found the last one folded inside the seed tin. It had only a single bead on its chain, pressed hard enough to tear the paper, and below it a faint pencil line running off the edge. I sat on an upturned crate with the lamp hissing and filled in the petals I could remember from his hand, then added beads, one for each ewe still heavy in the top field.

When the lamp guttered, the frost on the inside of the window had grown into a lotus of its own, its petals spreading where my breath had been. I drew the last bead beside the tear, wiped the nib on my jeans, and went out to check the grey ewe. She had started. Two lambs were steaming in the straw, and I left the gate open for the third.