Black fine line lotus flower with a dotted arc and a vertical unalome-style line tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Lotus and unalome on the inner wrist

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a lotus flower sits on the inner forearm, with a spiral at its base and a vertical line ending in dots below. A dotted arc circles above the flower. The linework is clean and the shading uses solid black areas on the petals, set against pale skin on a plain light surface.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Flower Unalome Spiral Dot Arc 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

Sit closer, the stove only has so much in it. You'll want to hear about Nan Hobday's pond, the one behind the top field that froze every January like a plate left out in the yard. She kept a lotus seed in a tin her husband brought back from a fair in Lincoln, and nobody believed a seed like that would open in a Norfolk bog. Mud is mud, they said.

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She didn't argue. Every morning before the cows, she broke the ice with the heel of a shovel and dropped the seed into the black water, then sat on the wall with her hands tucked in her apron and watched it sink. The men laughed at her from the barn door. Her son said she was feeding the eels.

The thaw came late that year, after the bells at Candlemas. Down in the mud the seed had sent one thin root into the cold, then a stalk that kept climbing, one knot at a time, the way a rope goes up a well. At its foot the stalk had curled once to face the light before it ever broke the surface. When it did, three petals were already folded inside, pale as tallow, and the frost lay in a ring around them as if someone had drawn it with a compass.

Bank that fire now, and fetch me the tin. The seed is still rattling about in it, waiting on another winter.