Solid black tribal-style lotus flower design with pointed petals on a white background, suitable as a blackwork tattoo flash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black lotus flower design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised lotus flower drawn as a solid black silhouette with sharp, pointed petals curving outwards. Negative white space forms an inner curl and the petal edges, giving a bold, graphic look. The design is shown in black ink only on a plain white background, with no skin or body visible.

Blackwork Botanical Lotus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In Scaw Harbour the old women said the tide had a mother, and she lived under the slipway where the mud turned black. Nobody fished there after dark. But the summer Tobin Reeve's father did not come home from the Gannet Rocks, his mother asked the boy to bring back whatever grew in the silt, because she had dreamed of it and would not say more.

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What grew there was a flower the colour of wet coal. Its petals came to sharp points like the prow of a boat and curled outward, and at its heart the petals folded inward so the centre looked like a held breath. Tobin cut one stem with his knife, and the water went still as a plate. A voice that sounded like rope running through an old block asked him what he meant to pay for it.

He had nothing but his father's brass compass, so he offered that. The voice laughed and said the sea had enough needles already. It wanted what would be given back to him, and he said yes without understanding. Walking up the slipway with the flower inside his coat, he found the lamps of the town lit and no one calling his name.

His mother stood at the window with a lamp in her hand, and she looked straight through him to the water. Then the boat came in on the flood with his father at the tiller, grey and salt-stiff, and the compass was lashed to the mast where it had never been. Every spring after, the mud at the slipway bloomed black, and Tobin never went down to it again. He kept the stem pressed in the family Bible, and the harbour kept its side of the bargain.