Blue ornamental tattoo of a lotus with paisley-style drops and leaf detail, placed on the shoulder and upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Blue ornamental lotus on a shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a symmetrical lotus-like flower with a central leaf motif, surrounded by layered petals and teardrop shapes with fine dotted and line detailing. The linework is crisp and the shading moves between deeper and lighter blue tones to give depth. Only blue ink is used, and the design is centred on the top of the shoulder against plain skin.

Botanical Shoulder Lotus Paisley Mandala Leaf Flower Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pass me that blanket, the wind's gone round to the north-east and it finds every gap in a man's coat. You'll want to hear about the Brannoch women and their blue cloths, because the whole fleet ran on them, whether the men would admit it or not.

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Old Ada Brannoch dyed her linen in the vat behind the net loft, and the indigo stained her to the elbows for a month after. She carved her block herself from a length of pear wood: a lotus opening at the top, a leaf standing in its heart, and below it four teardrops hanging like drops off an oar after rain. Every boat out of Skelder carried one folded in the wheelhouse, and every wife pressed that same pattern into her husband's collar with a spoon of hot wax, so from the harbour wall you could tell the fleet by its dye in the dark water.

The winter the Morag Rose went missing off the Stacks, nobody on the wall could say which blue was whose. Ada stood there all night with her cloth held up to the lantern. Her son Tam had gone out with a fresh print sewn inside his oilskin, and she had run short of indigo the week before, so the middle teardrop was left bare. She'd promised him she'd fill it when he came home.

Just before dawn a single light came round the headland, low in the water, swinging the way a boat does when it has only one engine left. Tam stepped onto the slip, unbuttoned his oilskin and held it open to her. 'Thought you'd want it finished, Mam,' he said. She laughed and cried at once, and she filled that teardrop there on the cold stones with the last of the vat, while the gulls came down to watch.