Black ink pen drawing of a rose on paper, surrounded by a fine lace-like geometric mandala pattern, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rose with lace mandala design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pen drawing of an open rose with shaded petals sits at the centre of a symmetrical mandala-style pattern. The rose is drawn with fine hatched linework and the surrounding petal-shaped panels use a web of lace-like lines, scallops and small dots. The drawing is black ink on cream paper, with a Micron pen lying across the top left corner.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Rose Mandala Lace pattern Flower Petal Dot

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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 lace on the Aurora's tablecloths had gone grey at the scallops, so on the Monday before the Jubilee dance I unpicked the big round cloth from table nine and carried it home under my coat. Mr Cole said nobody would notice. I noticed. My mother had made that cloth in 1937, sitting by the front window with a pillow of bobbins and a needle no thicker than a hair, and every petal in its border has a tiny dot where she paused to think.

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Under the lamp I found what I had never thought to look for: a rose, worked into the centre in a darker thread, its petals drawn with lines so fine they only showed when the light caught them at an angle. She hid it under the pattern the way she hid everything she was proud of. Ten years I had watched couples turn across that ballroom floor, and not one of them had ever looked down at the lace that was stitched into the tablecloths they danced past.

Teddy Marsh, who leads the band and has never once arrived on time, knocked at half past seven with his trumpet case under one arm. He wanted to know if the cloth was ready. I told him it would go back on table nine when I was finished, and that the rose was not for the cloth at all. He stood in the doorway a long while, then asked whether I would sew it onto the hem of my own dress, where it could be danced on in the open.

I said I would. Nobody noticed it through the whole of the first waltz, which is exactly how she would have wanted it.