Colourful forearm tattoo of a black-outlined lotus with mandala detail, beside a row of arrows, a star and a crescent moon, over teal and pink watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and arrows with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A black line-work lotus with mandala-style inner detailing sits on the forearm, with a column of small arrows, a star and a crescent moon extending to the right. Dotted accents surround the flower and the linework is fine and clean. Soft teal, pink, blue and yellow watercolour washes spread behind the design, and the composition centres the lotus on the arm.

Botanical Geometric Forearm Lotus Mandala Arrow Star Crescent moon Dot Splash

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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

Sit closer, the fire only holds its warmth for the first hour, and I will not shout this twice. You want the one about Orla Vance and the seed ship Marigold, the one the children on the lower rings get wrong. They say she flew the ship into a comet's tail. She did no such thing. She flew it through the green dust off Sallow Reach, where the water ice turned blue and rose in the sun, and she kept the hull true by the arrows.

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Those arrows were painted on the bulkhead by her grandmother, who had never seen a star with her own eyes, only read about them in a dead language. Three small arrows, a star, and a moon with its horns turned left, all pointing the way the ship was meant to go. When the navigation array failed in the ninth year, the crew argued for a week about which way was north. Orla laid her palm flat on the old paint and said the arrows had never once lied to anyone who looked up.

So she looked up. She read the dust the way you read a face in a crowd, watching which way it leaned, and she brought the Marigold through the bloom with the lights dimmed and the air thinning. Forty hours later the lotus opened on the forward screen, a great pale flower of frozen gas with its petals laid out in rings, and grown men wept without shame.

When they cleaned the bulkhead after landing, they found a smear of ochre beside the star where her thumb had rested. Nobody had the heart to scrub it away.