Black ink drawing on cream paper of a lotus flower above an Om symbol, with a small dot and curved line between them, shown as a tattoo design.

Lotus flower and Om symbol design

Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn black ink design of a lotus flower with pointed petals and three small dots above it, sitting above a curved line with a dot and an Om symbol. The linework is even and uniform in weight, with no shading. The design is shown in black ink on a plain off-white paper background, with no body part visible.

Lotus Om Dot Flower Symbol Line drawing

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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 stamp is the only thing you trust at this hour, so you press it twice, the way your supervisor taught you, and slide the passport back under the glass. The man on the other side has been holding a sheet of drawing paper against his chest since the lorry lights came up the hill. He has not said a word in four minutes. You ask him, in the flat English you use for everything, what it is.

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He turns it round. Black ink, a flower with pointed petals opening above a page, three dots hovering over it like drops that have not yet decided to fall. Beneath it sits the curl of a sound you learned in your grandmother's kitchen, looping and unhurried, ending in a tail that runs off the edge of the paper. He says his daughter drew it when she was nine, copying it from a card in a shop that has since closed. She is in a hospital two hundred miles north. He is going to her with the drawing because she asked him to bring her something that was not a machine.

You have a rule about personal items, and you have never once broken it. You look at the flower for longer than the rule allows, at the even weight of the lines, the way nothing is shaded or made to look more real than it is. Behind you the barrier arm lifts with its groan. You stamp nothing new. You hand the paper back, then lean out of the booth and say, quietly, the word your grandmother used for lotus, which you have not said aloud in years.