Black and grey dotwork lotus mandala tattoo centred on the chest below the breasts, with a person's hands holding up a grey top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental lotus tattoo on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower made of layered petals sits at the centre of the torso, with a teardrop-shaped core filled with fine ornamental patterns. The shading is built from dense dots and stippled lines, giving the piece a textured, engraved look. The design is entirely black and grey and sits symmetrically in the frame, with a grey top held up on either side.

Dotwork Botanical Chest Lotus Mandala Flower Ornament Petal

Find an artist for this

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 tin of lamp oil had frozen again, so I carried it into the kitchen and set it on the rail of the Aga while Dad argued with the ewe in the lean-to. Mum's sketchbook lay open on the table where she'd left it in October, the page with the lotus half done. Every petal was packed with dots no bigger than a pinhead. She had taught herself stippling from a faded manual the winter the milk price fell, when she needed something to do with her hands after dark. I used to think it was a way of ignoring the weather.

Keep reading

Dad came in stamping snow from his boots and found me squinting at the page. The outer petals were finished, shaded grey at their edges like the underside of a cloud. The teardrop in the middle was only an outline, with its inner pattern left as pencil ghosts. He poured two mugs of tea without asking what I was doing and told me she'd meant to do the centre in February, when the light came back early. I said the light was not the problem. The problem was that I'd never held a needle that steady in my life.

I sat down with her steel nib and a jar of ink thinned with rainwater. My fingers would not warm, so I wrapped the other hand round the mug and pricked the paper in small, patient taps. The first dots blurred into blots. The next ones sat where they should. By three in the morning the lamp had burned low and the teardrop had a spiral of dots running through it like a seed head.

At first light the window had grown its own pattern of frost, a crowd of tiny white stars across the glass. Dad went out to check the ewe and came back to say she had lambed twins in the straw. I looked at the page, then at the window, and could not tell which one had been drawn by hand.