Black line flash sheet of five ornate lotus flowers with paisley-style detailing, stems and leaves, in a fine line botanical style.

Five ornate lotus flower designs

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows five separate lotus flower designs arranged in a grid on a plain white background. Each flower has layered petals filled with fine scrolls, dots, teardrop shapes and paisley-like ornament, and most have a thin curved stem with one or two leaves. The linework is black and uniform in weight, with no shading or colour, and the designs are spaced evenly apart.

Botanical Fine line Lotus Flower Leaf Stem Paisley Ornament Scroll Dot

Find an artist for this

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 mud at the edge of Hollin Wood takes your boots to the ankle every morning, and every morning the water lilies have already opened, their petals layered like the tiers of a wedding cake your aunt once described. You carry a folded sheet of cartridge paper and a pencil wrapped in string. The block-cutter in Ashby wants the lotus drawn exactly as it grows, so the indigo printers can carve it into cloth. Nobody else in the village has been sent this far.

Keep reading

The trouble is the scrolls. Each time you bend close to count the dots along a petal, a curl at its tip seems to have turned a little further in, as if the flower is working out its own pattern in the mud. You draw a leaf, then a stem that bends like a question mark, and by the third morning the margins are crowded with spirals you never meant to make. Mrs Pell at the dye-vat laughs when she sees them. She says the wood copies whoever is looking hardest.

On the fourth day you stop trying to be exact. You sit against an alder root, close the sketchbook, and let the pencil follow the teardrops wherever they want to go. When you open it at dusk the drawing has spilled past the edge of the paper and onto the wooden table beside you, where the stems curl around the knots and dry into the grain.

The next morning the cutter holds up a carved board and turns it to the light. Every dot is in place, every petal is layered as it was in the bog, and the flower on it is already open. He asks whose design it is. You tell him the wood's, and he nods as though that was the answer he expected, and reaches for the next block.