Black line drawing of a botanical tattoo design with poppy flowers, dotwork and paisley-like ornaments, with dangling drop chains, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Poppy and mandala tattoo design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink line drawing of a tattoo design showing two open poppy-style flowers above a symmetrical mandala-like ornament. The ornament is filled with fine dotwork, scalloped curves and teardrop motifs, with a row of dots and drops hanging from its lower edge. The drawing is in black linework on a white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Dotwork Poppy Flower Mandala Paisley Dot Drop Chain 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

Sit down, and mind the chair, it has one leg shorter than the sea. Fourteen summers back the poppies came up along the Mallow Wall where nobody had planted them, and Nell Trewin, who kept the chandlery by the lower slip, took it as a sign and went out for a pencil and a pot of ink.

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She drew the way her mother had taught her to draw lace, starting from the centre and working outwards in rings, so that every scallop answered the one before it. The men of the harbour brought her old net floats and cracked lamp glass to sketch on, and she gave each back a ring of dots, a row of drops hanging from the hem like rain off a gutter, and a chain of little fastenings that held nothing at all but would not let the eye rest.

The turn came in March, when the Ellery boat did not come in. Nell sat up with the lamp and drew the same flower forty times, each a little looser than the last, until the final sheet was nothing but petals and dripping ends. Old Pim found it on the table at dawn and said it was the first honest chart of the bay he had ever seen, because it showed where the water had been taking things.

They say the boat came in on the morning tide with its lamp still lit. Nell never drew another poppy. She keeps the sheets in a drawer under the tar tins, and if you ask nicely she'll lift one out and trace the drops with a fingertip, counting them the way you count stitches, until you forget what you came in for.