Black linework geometric lotus tattoo with swirling details on a forearm, with small script text running along the wrist.

Geometric lotus tattoo on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm is held out against a blurred outdoor backdrop of trees and a footbridge. The tattoo is a black linework design of a lotus-style flower with layered petals, set inside a circle with swirling scroll-like elements on either side. A few lines of small serif text run along the wrist, partly out of focus.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Lotus Flower Leaves Swirl Circle Script Text

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 bridge at Saint Aldric's was only a painted line on the tarmac, and I had stamped passports on the east side of it for nineteen years. Every page got the same ink from the same brass die, a lotus caught inside a ring, cut by my father in a workshop in Leeds. Nobody in the office could explain it. "It's for luck," he used to say. "Nothing on a border is for luck," I always answered.

Keep reading

The night the flood took the lower road, a man came across on foot with a folder of drawings under his arm instead of a passport. He would not open his coat. He pushed up his sleeve instead and held out his forearm under the lamp. Small serif type ran along it, half smudged by the rain, and I read the first line aloud before I could stop myself: the truth does not. The rest had gone to water. I asked him what it meant. He said it was the opening of a letter he had never finished, and that someone had promised him the stamp would know where he belonged.

I opened the folder while he dripped on my counter. Every sheet held the same flower, drawn again and again, its petals layered like shutters, scrolls curling out from either side like the handles of a cart. The oldest was dated in my father's handwriting. The die had not been decorative at all. He had copied it from a sketch a traveller once showed him, years before the bridge had a guard.

I stamped the man's page and pressed the ring down with my thumb until the edges were clean. Then I waved him through. Under the lamp I watched the ink dry, and the lotus faded into the paper until only its outline held, the way a line of script survives long after the words have run.