Black dotwork tattoo of a spiral with a looping line above and a lotus-style mandala below, set on a central part of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spiral and lotus mandala tattoo

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A single black tattoo shows a spiral with a looping line rising from its top, set above a lotus-like mandala of layered petals. Dotted lines extend left, right and downward from the centre, forming a symmetrical cross-like composition. The petals are shaded with stippled dots and the spiral uses solid linework, all in black and grey ink on pale skin.

Dotwork Geometric Other Spiral Lotus Mandala Dot Line Petal

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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 closer, the lot of you, for the fire won't keep the owls off if you sit on the far side of it. You want the tale of the pond under the hazels where the path goes soft? Good. Then mind the bit about the dotted road, because that's where most of you go wrong.

Keep reading

Before there was a mill at Hollin Bottom, there was a fiddlehead fern that grew so tightly curled it had never once opened. Every spring the goat girl, Nell Parrow, walked out to see if it had let go yet. Her grandmother said it would open when someone spoke the right name to it, and Nell tried a hundred names, from her brother's to the name of the billy goat that bit her.

One wet May the fern uncurled without any help. Out of its middle rose a pale stalk, bending like a question, and at the top of it sat a lotus, which nobody in Hollin had ever seen, because lotus grows on still water and there was no water in that wood. Nell sat on a root and watched the petals open one by one, shading from dusk to ash as they went, while the wet came up through the moss to meet them. Dots ran out from the flower in four directions, each one a stepping stone, and where they ended the birdsong stopped.

Nell walked the stones home and never told anyone which way she'd come. The pond is still there, though you'll only find it if you've stopped asking for it. If you hear a goat bleating on the far side of the hazels, don't go looking. Leave a name on the bank instead, and let the fern decide what to open.