Black and grey pencil and ink drawing of a rose set within a dotwork mandala, with feathered leaves, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Rose and mandala design on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A rose with a layered centre sits within a symmetrical mandala of scalloped petals and ornate panels, with leaves extending outward at the sides and top. The linework is bold and clean, and the petals and mandala panels are shaded with stippled dots and light pencil tones. The drawing is set on a pale sheet with no body part visible.

Dotwork Botanical Rose Mandala Leaves Ornament Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dance hall at Herne Bay had a floor that gave a little under the feet, and Walter Pask knew every board of it. He had laid most of them himself the spring before the war, and now he was on his knees by the bandstand with a pencil stub behind his ear and a sheet of cartridge paper weighted down with a tin of Brasso, trying to get a rose to sit still.

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Sally Quick watched from the cloakroom hatch. She had been told the drawing was for the Saturday poster, a rose for the Valentine's dance, but she had seen him spend the whole dinner break on one petal. He kept stippling it with the nib of his pen, thousands of tiny dots, until the shadow looked like rain on a window.

"Too much dark at the heart," she said, when he finally stood and rubbed his knees.

He studied the paper for a long time. "It's not the dark, Sal. The rose wants a frame. Something to tell your eye where to stop." So he built the mandala around it, scallops and panels, rows of dots along each edge like the trim on a good frock, and leaves fanning out at the sides as if the whole thing might lift off the page and go dancing. When he was done he held it up under the single bulb over the stage. "There," he said. "Now the rose can't wander off."