Fine line black tattoo of a lotus flower with a dotted halo and an unalome line running down the forearm.

Lotus and unalome on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline lotus flower sits at the top of the design, with a spiral and a stacked looped knot below it that run into a single thin line ending in three dots. A dotted circle sits behind the flower, with scattered dots at its sides. The linework is thin and uniform in black ink on pale skin, centred on the forearm against a soft, blurred background.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Unalome Spiral Dot Circle Flower Knot Line

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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

The stairs of Carrow Keep stop at the eleventh step, so you climb the last stretch along the broken wall, hands in the ivy, boots finding the lichen ledges your grandmother showed you when you were small enough to be carried. Below, the moat is a green pan of duckweed. Nobody has drained it since the gatehouse was sold for scrap.

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Halfway up the north tower you find the lotus. It has no business being here. A single pale bloom has pushed through a crack in the mortar where a window frame once sat, its petals folded open against the stone as if it had paid good money for the view. You crouch to look at it. The mud beneath is black and sour, the sort of soil that should grow nothing but nettles, yet the stem runs down into it as straight as a plumb line.

The letter from the solicitor has been in your coat for three weeks. It says the castle is yours, or will be once you can stand the damp and the paperwork long enough to sign. You had meant to sell. Up here, with the wind pulling at your collar, you remember the word your grandmother used for the spiral and the looping knot she drew on the back of the Christmas cards: unalome, the thin path that climbs out of the mud and ends in three small dots.

You take the letter out and read it again. Then you fold it small and tuck it into the crack beside the flower, where the stone is still dry. The tower will keep it. Going down, you take the steps one at a time, and at the bottom you stop to look back at the bloom, pale against the grey, still standing in the muck as if it had never once doubted where it was going.