Fine line pencil drawing of a lotus flower running along a decorative arrow, with dotwork accents, shown as a tattoo design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and arrow tattoo design

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a tattoo design showing an arrow running diagonally across the page, with a lotus flower blooming at its centre. The arrow has a feathered head and tail, and the shaft is drawn with flowing looped lines and small dots. The linework is fine and uniform, with light shading on the petals and arrowhead, and the image is black and grey on a plain white background.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Arrow Lotus Flower Dot Swirl Design

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 vending machine on Ward Six has been swallowing your coins since eleven, and you have stopped arguing with it. Gwen from days left a note taped to the staff fridge: Sort the sharps bin before Matron does. You sort it. Beyond the window the car park lamps hum their usual pale note, and somewhere past the lifts a monitor sounds its small polite alarm, then gives up.

Keep reading

At half three Mr Dunmore in bed nine asks whether it's light yet. It isn't, you tell him, but the kettle's on. He nods as though that's an answer he can use. You sit on the plastic chair and draw on the back of a blood-test request form, the way you did in the lectures: a stem bending like a fishing line, a bud lifting out of dark water, a shaft that loops and loops and refuses to go straight. The biro runs dry halfway through a petal, so you press harder on the next one.

He wakes at four and talks about his wife's pond, the one she dug with a borrowed spade and filled with lilies she swore would never take in Stoke clay. Then he asks what you're drawing. You turn the form round. He squints for a long time and says the arrow's pointing the wrong way. It's meant to go out, you say, not in. He laughs, and the laugh turns into a cough, and you hold the cup while he drinks.

At six the window greys. You fold the form into your top pocket, the arrow still aimed at the lift doors, and when the day shift comes through with their flasks you're already on the stairs, the lotus still open on the paper, the shaft still bending towards whatever morning is coming.