Colour lotus flower with black swirling vine linework in a botanical fine line style, tattooed along the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and swirling vine down the side

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A pink and red lotus flower sits at the lower end of a long, black vine of swirls and dotted tendrils that curves up the side of the torso. The petals are shaded with soft gradients of red, magenta and grey, while the vine and surrounding scrolls are drawn in fine, dark grey-black lines. The design climbs diagonally across the frame against smooth skin, with a patch of purple fabric visible at the left edge.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Lotus Flower Vine Swirl Scroll Tendril

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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 lot of you, the lamp is failing the way the rest of us are, one wick at a time. Gaddesby's Marvels has not had a full house since the summer the bearded lady married the farrier and took the good horses with her. What we have left is Nell Ashby, a rope-walker with knees like walnuts, and a tent pole wound with ivy since before any of us were born.

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Nell was the one who kept the vine. Every winter when the canvas came down, she cut the dead tendrils back and bound the living ones round the pole with strips of her mother's purple shawl, the one that smelled of pipe smoke and wet hay. The lads laughed. Sid the strongman said it was a waste of good cloth. Nell said a pole that grows something is a pole that is still standing.

The year the bank took the big top, we pulled the stakes in the rain and left the field behind us, full of mud and broken trestles. Months later the bearing wagon went back through, and Nell, who had refused to sell the pole, stood in the wet grass by the old ring. Between two split boards, where the sawdust had rotted into soil, a bud was pushing up through the muck, pink at the tip, swelling on a stem as thick as a thumb.

She sat down in the mud and did not get up until the bloom had opened. Sid came back for her at dusk. He never said what he saw, only that she was laughing, and that the flower had come up out of that field as if nobody had asked it to. Mind your footing going out. The ground is softer than it looks.