Black and grey fine line lotus flower tattoo on a forearm, with a thin stem, two small dots and a looped infinity-style line below.

Lotus flower on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower sits on the forearm, drawn with fine black outlines and light grey shading on the petals. A thin stem runs down from the flower, ending in a looped infinity-style line with two small dots beside it. Part of a second tattoo, a floral swirl design, is visible on the upper leg at the top of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Stem Infinity Dot Swirl

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 cook on the Constance Mary, Ada Pell, kept a single lotus in a tin bath on the wheelhouse roof, and nobody was allowed to touch it. The seed had come from a market in Lisbon, folded in a handkerchief inside her coat, and every spring it pushed up through the grey scum of the water as if it had a grudge against the harbour. We teased her for it constantly. Then the February gale took our nets off Greaves Bank, and Ada stopped teasing and started knotting.

Keep reading

She taught me the mending in the net loft that winter, with the stove ticking and the twine stiff with cold. Her knot was the one she called the endless loop, a sheet bend that folded back on itself so the line could never slip off a cleat. She finished every row with a dot of tar pressed from her thumb, so you could find where you had stopped. A boat needs two things, she said, a way out and a way home, and the knot holds both. I took it for the sort of thing old women say until my own hands began doing it without me.

In March the wind backed north-east and tore the tin bath off the roof. We found it jammed under the slipway, the lotus still in it, one leaf bent flat. Ada said nothing. She carried it up the shingle to the harbour wall, dug a hole in the rubble with a fish knife, and set the roots in the wet stones where no tide could reach them.

The Mary came in on the morning tide, and I walked the wall before anyone else was up. The flower had opened overnight, pale as a cup, on ground that had never held anything but gulls and weed. Ada was asleep in the loft with a needle still in her fist. I left her there and did not wake her.