Black ink linework drawing of a symmetrical floral mandala with petals, leaves, scrolls and dotted shading, drawn on white paper beside a black fineliner pen.

Symmetrical floral mandala design in ink

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala-style floral design drawn in black ink on white paper, with a large central flower surrounded by smaller blooms, pointed leaves and curling scrolls. The linework is fine and even, with stippled dots adding shading around the centre and leaf edges. The design is entirely black and grey and fills the frame, with a black fineliner pen placed at the right edge.

Botanical Dotwork Mandala Flower Leaf Scroll Bloom Floral pattern

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

Pour the last of that cider, Tomas, and shut the door properly, because the snow has found the latch again. You want the tale of the pattern-maker's girl? Then pull your stool close, for the fire is only a promise tonight.

Keep reading

Ida Marr drew flowers the way other folk counted coins. Each morning she sat at the window of the Hollin Cross inn with good paper and a black pen no longer than her finger, and she began from the middle, because her mother had said a flower started at its edge would never find its heart. The centre was always one great bloom of a hundred fine petals. Round it crowded the smaller blossoms like guests at a wedding, the scrolls curled between them like sleeping cats, and the leaves came last, pointed as spearheads and feathered down their spines.

One winter the snow shut the pass for nine weeks. A carter called Obed, stranded with a load of bone buttons, watched her work and asked why she never let a line run off the page. She said a mandala was only a promise that everything comes back round to where it started. He laughed and said the road to Carlisle had taught him no such thing. On the ninth morning the plough came through and he left in such a hurry he forgot his coat. She found it folded on the settle, and in its pocket a sheet of her drawing, the central bloom shaded with a stub of charcoal, and beneath it, in careful capitals, the single word RETURN.

The thaw came in April. Obed came back the following winter with a new coat, the same grin, and a tin of ink he swore was the best in the north. Ida took it without a word and, for the first time in her life, left the middle of her next drawing blank. That is where his bloom went, and you will find it there still, if you ever sit at that window in the snow.