Black line-work lotus flower tattoo with dotted detail on the side of a torso, with a hand resting on the skin above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black line lotus on the side of the torso

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black line-work lotus flower with curling petals, paisley-like inner patterns and small dots sits on the side of the torso. The fine, even linework uses hatching and dotted fills within the petals, with no shading or colour. The image is cropped close, with a hand resting at the top left against plain skin.

Fine line Botanical Other Lotus Flower Leaves Dot Mandala

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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 lost property tray at Carrowby Junction holds mostly umbrellas by the first week of November, but on the Tuesday the rain stops you find a folded square of tracing paper tucked inside a timetable. You unfold it under the counter lamp. Someone has drawn a lotus in black ink, every petal crosshatched with fine lines, and along its edges a row of dots like rain beaded on a window. There is no name on it and no ticket, only the drawing.

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Dev, the porter, leans over your shoulder with his tea and says it looks like the wallpaper in the old Dunmore Hotel, the one they stripped in the seventies. You tell him it looks like something meant to be looked at for a long time. On your break you try copying a single petal onto the back of an envelope, but your pen keeps snagging the paper, and your hand isn't patient enough for what the lines ask of it.

On Thursday the 4:10 to Harrowgate waits at platform three with its doors open and nobody boarding. A woman comes back along the platform quickly, peering into each carriage window, and you know before she speaks that she has lost something she made with her own hands. You hand her the tracing paper. She doesn't unfold it. She holds it flat against her coat and says she thought she'd left it on the seat, and asks if you'd mind if she didn't open it until she was home.

After the train pulls away, you return to the counter and pin the envelope with its half-finished petal to the corkboard, where the timetables used to hang. The dots from the drawing are still in your head when the next train's signal changes from red to green, and you find you have been counting them.