Black dotwork mandala tattoo design drawn on cream paper, with lotus-like petals radiating from a central flower.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical mandala design on paper

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical mandala drawn in black ink on cream paper, shown on a wooden surface. The design has a central flower of rounded petals surrounded by layered outer petals and rings of dots. The linework is fine and the shading is built up from stippled dots, with no colour used.

Dotwork Geometric Mandala Lotus Flower Dot 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

Mrs Ada Penhale had counted the dots on the rosette for three weeks before the foreman noticed the pattern book was missing from the drafting room. She kept it under her shawl, in the cold corner by the boiler, and worked by a single lamp while the others were at their dinners.

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The design was a flower opened on a table of paper, petal after petal, each ring pricked out in tiny points so the lace-frame could read it. Her father had drawn it in 1887 with a brass compass and a pen he never cleaned properly, and he had sworn it could not be copied because nobody would have the patience to put in the dots. Ada had the patience. She had little else.

On the last night she held the sheet against the window and saw that the outer petals did not close. There was a gap at the south point, one dot wide, where the compass had slipped. Her father had left it there on purpose, or so the story went, so the flower could breathe. She took a pen and did not fill the gap. Instead she counted the dots in the outer ring, forty-eight, then forty-nine, and understood she had been reading the wrong side of the paper all along.

In the morning the frames went out as usual. The foreman held the new sheet up to the light, turned it over, and said nothing for a long time. Then he pinned it above the door where everyone could see the gap, and Ada went back to her frame and began her own count from there.