Black and grey botanical tattoo of a lotus flower with curling vines and swirls across the lower abdomen and hip, with a pink lace top and underwear in view.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and vine on lower abdomen

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with a central bloom, leaves and curling vine swirls runs diagonally from the hip up towards the ribs. The work is done in black linework with soft grey shading on the petals and leaves. The tattoo sits on bare skin against a pale pink lace top and matching lace underwear, with the image cropped below the chest and above the upper thigh.

Botanical Fine line Other Lotus Flower Vine Swirl Leaves

Find an artist for this

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 pond had been drained for the winter, so the lotus stood in its stone trough like something left out in the rain. Brother Edwin wanted the vine off the north wall before the frosts, and he sent me up the ladder with the shears and a bucket for the cuttings. I went up grumbling. Ivy has roots like a grudge, and I expected more of the same.

Keep reading

Halfway along the wall I found the vine was not ivy at all but something older, its stems thick as my thumb and curling back on themselves in loops that someone had trained there with patience. The leaves were the grey-green of wet slate. I set the shears down on the coping. Tucked into the mortar at the height of my eye was a square of paper, folded small, in the hand of a monk who had died before my mother was born. Keep the curl. The roots still remember the water.

I carried the note down to Edwin, who read it twice and then laughed until he had to sit on the step. He told me the old abbot had kept seed from a lotus brought back from a temple in Bangkok in a tin in 1931, and that nobody had ever made one flower open in English mud. We had tried every spring. The trough held only leaves and a smell of rot.

I left the vine standing. In June I went out before the bell, and in the trough, between the cracked rim and the black silt, a single bloom had opened, pale as the inside of a shell, with the curl above it green again. Edwin pretended not to be glad. He said the water had only been waiting for someone to stop cutting.