Blue line drawing of a symmetrical panda face flanked by two koi fish and lotus flowers, in a dotwork and Japanese-influenced style, shown as a tattoo design on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Symmetrical panda with koi and lotus

Dotwork · Colour · Flash

A mirrored design shows a panda's face at the top, with two koi fish and lotus flowers on either side and wave-like linework beneath them. The panda's fur is drawn with fine hatched strokes, while the fish scales and the shaded areas use dense dotwork. The design is rendered in a single shade of blue ink on a pale cream background, with the composition centred and balanced.

Dotwork Japanese Panda Koi Lotus Fish Wave

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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 yourselves down and mind the cat's dish, and someone pass the teapot before I start, because this one's a long road round to the sea. Back when the Porthcade boarding house still had its blue-striped awnings, a lodger came to us in October with a tin trunk of pens and a face like a wet Sunday. Mr Hollis, he called himself. He took the back room over the scullery and drew every morning on the blank sides of the tide tables, bent close to the lamp with his tongue between his teeth.

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He drew a panda, mind, with fur so fine you could have combed it, and he kept it turned to the window as if it were waiting for the boats. Then the storm came in off the bay, the kind that lifts the slates, and the rain butt by the scullery door filled to the brim. In the morning there were two koi in it, orange-white and slick as new soap, and a pair of lotus pads wrapped round their fins like handkerchiefs. My sister swore she saw them swim the wave-lines painted on the tiles, up the wall and back down again, though she'd had a drop of sherry by then.

Mr Hollis was gone before breakfast. Left the drawing pinned above his bed, with the panda's face and the fish on either side, and every line on the left had its twin on the right, as if he'd folded the paper and pressed it. Nobody could say which had come first, the fish or the ink. The lotus leaves had dried to paper in the rain butt, and the scullery floor was wet all the way down to the harbour steps. Still is, some mornings, if you go out early and look at the tideline. The dotwork shows in the sand, you see, and it's damp to the touch.