Close view of a small black fine line outline of a lotus flower tattooed on the side of a person's ribs, below the arm.

Fine line lotus tattoo on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A single lotus flower is drawn in thin black outline, with pointed petals fanning upwards from a short base. The tattoo sits on the side of the torso below the arm, and the rest of the frame shows a bare back, a cream top and a bent arm with a yellow bracelet. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the flower is placed low and off-centre in the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Outline

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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

Inspector Tom Ashby had opened four hundred suitcases that year and never once been asked to hold a jam jar up to the light. The woman at the Dover desk had a cardigan buttoned wrong and a passport gripped in both hands, and inside her hatbox, wrapped in a tea towel, was a jar of grey pellets labelled in pencil: Nelumbo, from the lake at Hue.

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"They're seeds," she said before he could ask. "Pond seeds. My husband ate his breakfast on that lake for forty years."

Ashby turned the jar. The pellets were hard as shot. He thought of the form he would have to fill in, the stamp, the forty minutes of paperwork, and the queue behind him that smelled of diesel and wet coats. He thought of the photograph in her passport, which showed a younger woman with the same chin.

He stamped the form himself. "Soak them in warm water for a day," he said. "Then keep them where the sun reaches, and wait. They can sleep for years, I'm told."

Three summers later, a letter arrived at the Dover office with a single pressed bloom inside, pink as a sunburn, and a line in pencil: It came up in the reservoir behind the church. Tell your customs man it opened in the morning, when the mud was still cold.