Black ink drawing of a symmetrical flower mandala with layered petals, dotted borders and swirl details, drawn on a sketchbook page, suitable as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical flower mandala in black ink

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a central flower with a spiral-cored bloom surrounded by layered, pointed petals and scalloped outer rings. It is drawn in black ink with fine dotted outlines, hatching inside the petals and small curled swirls along the edges. The design is fully symmetrical on white paper, with the sketchbook's spiral binding visible along the top.

Botanical Mandala Flower Lotus Petal Swirl 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

Mrs Okonedo's lift had been broken since Tuesday, so Nadia carried the shopping up fourteen floors and found the sketchbook on the landing, left on the radiator shelf by someone who'd given up on the stairs too. The spiral wire had bent at the top where it had been sat on. Inside, every page was a flower, drawn in biro so fine it looked like frost on glass. She sat down on the cold concrete step and turned them over one by one.

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The last drawing was a mandala with a bloom at its heart, a spiral pressed into the centre like the eye of a snail, and petals stacked around it in ranks, each one hatched with lines that ran the way rain runs down a window. Round the outside, scallops and small curled hooks went all the way round, the kind of border her gran used on the crocheted doilies that lived under every telly on the estate. Nadia traced the spiral with her thumb. Somebody had counted every dot.

Downstairs a door banged and a pram wheel knocked against the wall. She thought about the flat on the eleventh floor where the lad with the sketchbook had lived before the council moved him out after the damp. Her brother had said he drew all night, sat on the balcony in a parka, filling pages while the wind lifted the corners. Nadia had never spoken to him. She'd only seen the ink on his fingers at the bin chute.

She took the book up to fourteen and set it on her own windowsill, facing the car park and the grey towers beyond. In the morning the sun came through the spiral binding and threw a row of small bright circles across the paper, and for a minute the mandala looked like it was turning. She decided to keep it until someone asked for it back.