Pencil sketch of an ornamental tattoo design with a flame motif, a lotus, a moth and dotted accents, shown as a drawing with no body placement.

Lotus and moth design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of an ornamental tattoo design stacked vertically on pale tracing paper. It shows a flame-like shape at the top, a detailed lotus with leaves, a small decorative crest, and a moth with patterned wings at the base. Fine hatching and dotted accents are used throughout, with a faint shadow pattern beneath the moth.

Botanical Dotwork Flame Lotus Flower Leaves Moth Ornament Dot Sketch

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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

Ines had drawn the moth forty times before the drone tech would let her near the lamp. Nobody on Carrick Ring trusted anything that flew unless it had been counted twice.

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The lamp was the old kind, a brass chimney with a flame that breathed whenever the air recyclers cycled. Below it, in the hydroponic basin, the lotuses opened one petal at a time, pale as paper, and the moths came to them at the hour the spin lights dimmed. Ines kept the ledger. Every moth was a line, and every line bore a name she had given it in pencil on tracing sheets, because the ring's printers had jammed in her first year and the sheets never did.

On the night the seal alarm sounded, the moths would not leave the lamp. They circled the flame in a slow ring, wings flat and patterned like the crests carved over the hatch, and refused the door. Ines understood only when she read the pressure gauge: the flame was pulling air toward itself, drawing the leak back into the basin where the seal had failed.

She stayed with the lamp until the number settled. Then she sat on the cold floor and traced the outline of the wing she had been studying, adding one dot for each moth still alive. There were eleven. She wrote the count at the foot of the sheet, under the small crest, and underlined it twice, which was the only way she knew to say thank you to something that could not read.