Black ink pen drawing of a lotus flower on a looping, script-like stem, sketched on paper as a tattoo design with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and looping stem design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink drawing on white paper shows a lotus flower at the top, with its petals outlined in fine, open lines. Below it, a vertical stem made of looping, calligraphic strokes ends in an infinity-style loop, with a wooden pencil resting diagonally across the page. The image is composed as a flat design sketch on a dark leather surface, with no skin visible.

Botanical Lotus Flower Loop Infinity Stem Swirl

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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's gone low and the lamps along Mercer Row are guttering, so you'll have to lean in. My grandmother swore this happened on the night the trams stopped running, when the whole city of Harrowgate smelled of wet coal and frying dough. A girl called Ruth Abernethy sat at the far end of the stalls with a sketchbook on her knee and a pencil tucked behind her ear, drawing lilies for a dyer's widow who wanted them on her gate.

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She drew one flower at the top of the page, petals opening like tired hands, and then she couldn't stop. The stem ran down the paper in loops, each one tying itself into the last, until the line finished in a figure of eight lying on its side. The dyer's widow came to collect it and held it to the lamplight a long time. Then she said the girl had drawn the thing that kept a house from falling in, and paid her in cold tea and a promise.

Nobody in Harrowgate believed in that sort of nonsense, but the gate was never once rusted after that. Ruth's sketchbook went missing somewhere on the tram lines, though a boy on Cutler's Lane swears he found it, open at the last page, the pencil still lying across it as if she'd only just put it down to go home. So if you ever pass a loop of iron work with a flower on top, look twice. It might be waiting for someone to finish the stem.