Black and grey ink drawing of an ornate lotus and paisley mandala tattoo design, with dotwork shading, drawn on white paper.

Ornate lotus and paisley design drawing

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn tattoo design showing a symmetrical lotus flower at the base with stacked paisley-like leaves and scrolls rising above it. Fine outlines are combined with stippled dotwork shading and hatched lines that give the leaves depth. The design is rendered in black and grey on white paper, with a pencil and a pen resting at the top left.

Dotwork Botanical Lotus Paisley Leaf Scroll Mandala Flower

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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 hall still smelled of floor polish and stewed tea, and someone had hung a paper banner reading Class of 1994 that had already started to curl at one corner. I found Dilys by the urn, standing exactly where she used to stand in assembly, as if the years had been a short queue she had politely waited through.

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She didn't say hello. She opened her handbag, took out a Geography jotter gone soft at the edges and turned to a page near the back. A lotus sat in the middle, flanked by stacked leaves and scrolls, every shadow built from dots so fine I had to tilt the page toward the strip light. 'Detention, Mr Pryce's room, the week of the fire drill,' she said. 'You kept going on about the Hollis shawl, and I was trying to draw it so you'd shut up.'

I remembered the shawl, green wool with a teardrop border, Mrs Hollis wearing it over her cardigan even in June. I remembered telling Dilys that every shape in it had a name, which was a lie I'd made up on the spot. She had kept the page for thirty years. Then she tapped the lowest scroll, where the dots bunched into a small knot, and I saw that the knot was the letter R, tucked so cleverly among the shading that you had to be looking for it already.

I didn't know what to say, so I said the thing we'd both have said at fifteen. 'It's rubbish, you know. The leaves are wonky.' She laughed and closed the jotter, and for a moment we were back in that room with the radiator ticking, two girls pretending the drawing was the only thing in the building worth keeping.