Black ink sketch of an open lotus flower with hatched petals and a detailed centre on grey paper, a botanical tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower design sketch

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A lotus flower is drawn in black ink with its petals open and its stamens visible at the centre. The petals are shaded with fine parallel hatching and dark outlines, with small splashes of ink around the top edge. The drawing sits on a textured grey background and is shown in black and grey only.

Botanical Lotus Flower Petal Stamen

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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 yourselves down, mind the bin bags, and I'll tell you about the bowl on the fourteenth floor of Carrow House. Nobody in that block grew anything but grief and weeds in the cracks, so when Mrs Adaeze Obi carried a washing-up bowl up in the lift one March, the whole stairwell came out to look. It was full of black mud and a pond's worth of murky water, and in the middle, pressed down like a hard brown pearl, was a seed she'd carried from her mother's village in a tin of pencil shavings.

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The caretaker said no. The housing officer said no, with a form. The pigeons said nothing, which was worse, because they sat on the rail and waited. Adaeze talked to the bowl every morning while she hung out her sheets, and the young lad from flat 9 started bringing her cans of warm water from the tap in the bins room, because the balcony tap had been cut off since the flood. Nobody believed a thing so old could wake in a city like this.

Then one July morning, the seed split. A pale green shoot came up through the silt like a fist unclenching, and within a month there were leaves as wide as dinner plates lying flat on the water, and then, one dawn, a single bloom stood up on its stem, petals opening slow as a hand turning over. Its heart was full of gold dust and little stamens like tiny lamps.

People came up fourteen floors on foot that week to see it, and not one of them complained about the stairs. Adaeze only smiled and said that the mud had done all the work, and the flower had simply refused to stay in it.