Pen drawing of an ornate lotus tattoo design with mandala-like swirls and dots, drawn on white paper, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate lotus tattoo design in pen

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn ink design of a lotus flower with a central mandala-style motif, set on a vertical stem of swirls and tiny dots that extends below the bloom. The linework is fine and dense, with stippled and hatched shading in the petals and small scroll ornaments above the flower. The design is shown in black ink on white paper, centred in the frame.

Botanical Lotus Mandala Swirl Spiral Dot Flower Ornament

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

You'll want the good lamp for this, because the tale is all in the details, same as the flower on the wall of Mrs Penhaligon's parlour in Cromer. Nobody in that boarding house ever agreed on how many petals it had. Seven, the cook said. Nine, said the lodger from Leeds who counted everything twice. The thing was drawn in pen by a girl named Ivy Marsh, who came to the house the summer her father's boat went out past the breakwater and didn't come back, and who spent her evenings at the kitchen table with a black pen and a tin of biscuits, filling every petal with little curls until the paper went grey.

Keep reading

She told the landlady it was a lotus, a flower that grows up through mud and still comes out clean. Mrs Penhaligon thought that was rubbish and said so. But she also noticed the stem Ivy drew running down the page, a line of rings getting smaller and smaller towards the bottom, like ripples going out from a stone. Ivy said that was where the water had got to. Then she said it was where her father was, and the rings were him, still going quieter. Mrs Penhaligon gave her a second biscuit and didn't argue.

In October the sea gave back a red buoy and nothing else. Ivy folded the drawing into her coat and walked to the end of the pier, and the wind took the paper half a mile out, turning it over and over until it was only a white speck on the grey. The lodger from Leeds swore he saw the petals open on the water before it sank.

The drawing hangs in the parlour now, in a frame Mrs Penhaligon had made in Norwich. Count the petals yourself if you like. You'll get a different number every time, and she never minded.