Fine line black lotus flower tattoo with an unalome-style line and dots on the inner wrist.

Lotus and unalome on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower with shaded petals sits on the inner wrist, with a thin stem running down to a looping unalome-style line. Dots sit above and below the flower, and the thin linework is crisp with soft grey shading in the petals. The design is centred on a plain light skin area against pale bedding, in black ink only.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Unalome Dot Stem

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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 tide has already gone out when you reach the slipway at Porthkerris, and the boats lie on their sides in the mud like tired dogs. Your uncle Tomas is shouting from the winch about the second trawler and its cracked strake, and you are holding a coil of rope that smells of diesel and older things.

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Something has come up in the silt by the breakwater. You crouch, thinking it a dropped float, and find a stem as thick as a bootlace, green-black and wet, pushing through the grey toward the light. Above it sits a bud folded like a closed hand, the colour of a bruise. Nobody planted anything here. The harbour master says the drains upriver have been dumping sludge for thirty years and nothing good has grown in it since the war.

You bring it up on the flat of your palm to show Tomas. He squints, spits, and says that's no weed, that's a lily, the sort his mother kept in a jam jar on the windowsill. He says lilies do the ugly work first. They go down into the muck, they drink from the bottom, and only then do they open. He says it as though it's a complaint about you. You take it home in a bucket of seawater anyway.

By the Thursday the bud has split, pale petals opening like sails catching the first wind off the bay. You tie a loop of tarred twine round the jar to keep it steady, and when Tomas comes in for his tea he stops at the sill, looks at the flower for a long moment, and says nothing at all.