Black ink drawing on white paper of a stylised script-like letterform with curling flourishes and a lotus flower, a botanical tattoo design with no body part shown.

Lotus flower and swirl design on paper

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink tattoo design drawn on white paper, showing a bold, stylised script-like letterform with a curling tail. A lotus flower with pointed petals sits to the right, joined by thin swirling tendrils that curl around the base of the letterform. The linework is solid black with no shading, and the photograph is taken at a slight angle against a plain grey background.

Botanical Lotus Swirl Flourish Flower Scroll

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 ink ran thick on the stencil paper, so Imre told me to thin it with a drop of cold tea, the way his grandmother had done for the chapel banners. I had been at the bench eleven days. Outside the window of the Carrow Street archive, the drones were lifting the shutters on the flooded lower town, and the whole district smelled of diesel and wet brick.

Keep reading

The letter was an old one, a capital the index called a "J with a bloom", though nobody alive could say why a bloom would hang off a letter's shoulder. Imre said the tail was meant to curl back on itself so the reader's eye would hook and linger. The lotus beside it had been a seal of the old water board, back when the board still had a name worth printing. We copied them both onto the thin sheets the cutting machines could read, one stroke at a time, slow as a heartbeat.

On the last night, the machine balked at the lowest swirl, the one that loops under the stem like a question nobody answered. I thought it was a fault. Imre set down his brush and laughed, and said the people who first drew it had left that tendril open on purpose, so the letter could keep its hold on whatever came next. He pressed my hand flat on the paper and told me to close it myself.

I closed the loop with the fine nib, and the sheet went through the cutter clean. When the girl from the water board came for it the next morning, she held it up to the lamp and asked what the letter spelled. I told her it spelled nothing yet.