Small black fine line lotus flower with a looping stem on the inner forearm near the wrist, held by another person's hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line lotus on the inner forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower sits on the inner forearm near the wrist, drawn in thin black single-needle linework with a looping, knotted stem beneath it. A tiny dot floats above the bloom. The ink is solid black with no shading, and the rest of the frame is neutral skin, a brown knitted jumper and a pink and green painting in the background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Stem Loop Dot

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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 ballast barge had come in from Lisbon on the evening tide, and the bargeman swore there was a seed caught in the stones, so when the harbourmaster's clerk asked you to clear the old cistern behind the net loft, you said yes for the sake of something to do with your hands. Nobody had drawn water from it since the fire. The water was green as bottle glass and smelt of rope tar.

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By the second week a pale bud had pushed up through the slime, and it opened at dawn as though it had been waiting for someone to notice. Its stem came up crooked and kept doubling back on itself, looping round its own neck and tying knots the way the net-mender next door tied them, without thinking. Mrs Pellow from the chandlery said it was a bad omen, a flower that knots itself. You told her it was only a plant that had not yet worked out which way was up.

The trouble came in October, when the stem had wound so tight it began to bruise the petals. You went down with the fish knife and the clerk's lamp and sat on the cistern edge for an hour, trying to find the loop that was holding everything else. In the end you cut the lowest knot. The stem sprang loose, the bloom tipped, and a single dark seed lifted off the petal and hung in the air above it like a full stop, then dropped into the green water with a sound too small to hear. You watched the ripples cross the cistern until they reached the wall.

That spring a second bud came up on the spot where the seed had gone down, straight and unknotted, and you left the knife in the drawer.