Small black outline lotus flower tattoo in a fine line style on the upper arm, with a hand resting on the arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower on an upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower sits on the upper arm, drawn in thin black outline with the petals layered around a central bud. The linework is even and clean, with no shading, and the ink is solid black on light skin. The tattoo sits near the centre of the frame against a plain, softly blurred background, with a hand holding the arm to the left and a white top to the right.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Lotus Flower Outline

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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

By the third wet week the big top leaked over the trapeze rigging, and Mrs Okonedo said we would have to sew a new roof or sell the poles. I had a roll of spare sailcloth and a box of black ink pens from the ticket office, so I cut a square for the worst of the hole and drew a lotus on it. Nobody asked me to. I drew it the way my mother drew them on the pond wall at home, petals stacked like shutters around a closed bud, each edge one unbroken line.

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Teodor Vance, who had once been the finest wire walker in three counties, came out to watch me stitch it in place. He said a flower was no use to a circus, since nobody pays to see something that stays shut. I told him the bud opens if you give it enough morning. He laughed, then stopped laughing when the last crowds of that season filed under the patch and tipped their heads back to look up at it.

We closed in October. The elephants went to a farm in Kent and the ponies to a widow in Wales who promised them grass. I folded the patch into my kit bag with a pen still in its pocket, and I did not expect to see it again.

Two springs later I walked into a laundrette in Margate and found it pinned above the dryers, the black gone soft from washing, and beneath it someone had written in biro: OPEN EARLY. I stood there until the machine beside me buzzed to a stop. Then I went out into the grey light and let the bud stay closed a little longer.