Black ornamental lotus design with dotwork detail and a vertical line of dots above and below, shown as a flash drawing on a white background with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical lotus design with dotted spine

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical black lotus flower with layered pointed petals, a central bud and scroll-like inner ornaments. Fine dotwork and hatched linework fill the petals, and a vertical line of dots runs above and below the motif. The design is drawn in solid black on a plain white background, with the motif sitting slightly left of centre.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Flower Mandala Dot Ornament Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mirela had been pricking the same lotus through paper for eleven days when the harbourmaster climbed the stairs of the stencil shop to ask whether it could be made to look less like a wheel. She didn't look up. The pattern was for the ceiling of the Custom House lamp room, a flower opening out over the water, and every petal had to answer to the one on its left. Her father had taught her that symmetry was only patience with a ruler.

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The dots were the difficulty. Above the bloom they ran up the wall in a line of seven, and below it they ran down to the floor, and the harbourmaster wanted them to look like tide marks. Mirela thought they looked like the rivets on the boat that had been dragged out of the bay in the spring, the one nobody would name. She pricked them at dawn, when the gulls were still squabbling over the fish market and the light came flat across the slipway.

On the twelfth morning a boy from the net loft brought down a folded square of paper that had been found in a fisherman's coat. On it was the same lotus, drawn in ink by someone who had counted the petals differently, nine instead of eleven, with a bud tucked into the centre. Mirela laid it over her own sheet. The bud sat exactly where the lamp's glass would be, and she understood that the drowned man had been drawing the lamp room too.

She fixed the new centre in pencil, then pricked it through so the charcoal dust would fall on the plaster and leave a small black flower where he had meant it. The harbourmaster paid her and said the ceiling looked well. She kept the scrap of paper folded in her apron, and when the lamp was lit that night the petals threw their shadows across the water in eleven clean points, nine of them his.