Black and grey fine line lotus flower with dotwork shading, set within thin geometric diamond lines, on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower in a geometric frame on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with layered petals is drawn in fine black linework, with the petals shaded using stippled dots. Thin angular lines form a diamond and square frame behind and beside the flower, with a small dotted trail extending toward the lower right. The tattoo sits on a pale forearm against a plain light background, photographed straight on.

Fine line Dotwork Geometric Forearm Lotus Flower Petal Geometric frame Diamond Line Dot

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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 down, sit, the big top's been folded since the spring and the sawdust still remembers every foot that walked it. You want Madame Orsolya's lotus? Then mind the chalk on the floor, because that dotted trail is where the whole sorry business started.

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She had a fan act, years back, when the Halloran Brothers still had three rings. Orsolya stood in the centre spot with a silk bloom folded shut on a wire, and the lamps would come up slow, and she'd open it petal by petal, a layer at a time, until the crowd stopped chewing their toffee. The diamond frame was the rigging the ropeman built for her, two crossed rods and a square of brass to hold the bloom steady. Every night she walked out to the wire in her soft slippers, and every night the chalk on her toes left a little trail of dots across the boards.

Then came the winter the canvas split and the rain got in. The silk went grey with mould and the petals stuck together like wet paper. Nobody pays to see a flower that won't open, the manager said, so sell the frame and be done. Orsolya sat up with a lantern and stitched every petal back, one stitch at a time, while the boy Tomas held the wire steady and asked her why she bothered. A lotus, she said, doesn't open for the crowd. It opens for the water it's sitting in, and it waits for the water to be still.

In April the auction men took the rigging away. The last thing I saw was the bloom fixed to the frame in a flat field outside town, and the wind came up off the hills and turned every petal open on its own, slow as a lamp coming up. Tomas followed the chalk trail to the gate and didn't look back. The dots are still there on the boards, if you care to look.