Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with soft, painterly shading on the upper arm and shoulder of a woman with dark hair.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey lotus on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's upper arm and shoulder show a lotus flower tattoo with layered petals and a central bloom. The linework is loose and sketchy, with soft grey shading that fades into the edges of the petals. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against a plain black top and a brick wall in the background, with the woman's face not visible.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lotus Flower 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

The spring the river froze at the bend, Mirela Oss came down from the hill farms with a cart of dried apples and a box of brushes, and set up beside the fairground gate where the mud was driest. Her stall was a canvas awning with a single lamp, and the children of Hallow Ford came to watch her paint wet ink onto paper so thin it tore if you breathed on it.

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A boy named Tomas Greaves brought her a wager in pennies: he said she could not paint a flower that would open in the rain. She asked him to bring her the first thing he had lost that winter. He gave her a glass marble, cloudy and blue, and she rolled it in her palm until it warmed, then dipped her brush in the grey and began with the centre, the pale heart that holds the water.

The petals went down quick and rough, one over another, the edges left to bleed where the ink wanted to run. By dusk the paper held a bloom the colour of old pewter, and when the drizzle began it did not spread or blur but seemed to lift, each leaf turning up at its tip the way a flower does when it wants more light. Tomas stood in the wet and watched it open.

He paid her the pennies anyway. In the morning the stall was gone, and the marble was back on his windowsill, and nobody in Hallow Ford could say where the blue had gone out of it.