Colour lotus flower tattoo in pink and violet tones, with soft blended shading and white highlights, on the back of a shoulder.

Lotus flower on the shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A large lotus flower with several layered petals and a small bud fills the shoulder area of the skin. The petals use soft, blended shading with pale highlights along the edges, giving a painterly, watercolour-like finish. The palette is dominated by pink, magenta and violet, with touches of blue and yellow in the centre and beneath the petals.

Botanical Shoulder Lotus Flower Petal Bud

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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

The tin bath behind Pell's Dye Works had held the same brown water since spring, and Ada Pell had stopped pretending it was only rainwater. She knelt on the wet step with her sleeves rolled, a jam jar of madder in one hand, watching the lotus open its petals one at a time while the gulls argued over the fish quay. Her grandfather had sworn the seed came off a tea clipper in 1871, folded in oilcloth with a note in a script nobody in Saltcombe could read.

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Nobody could read the note, but everybody had an opinion about the flower. Mrs Hocking from the chandlery said it was bad luck to keep anything so showy beside a working yard. The customs man wanted to know whether it needed declaring. Ada only knew that each morning the outer petals had turned a little rosier, as though they had caught the colour from the vats and kept it. She had tried to match them with cochineal, indigo and a spoonful of lemon, and every time the blue came out too cold, so she had given up and let the bath do the work.

On the last morning of the dye season the spring tide came over the step and crept into the bath, lifting the lotus clear of its pot. Ada reached for the boathook, then stopped. The petals had gone pale at their edges, the way paint does when it is laid thin over wet paper, and the pink was bleeding out into the water in long clouds that spread across the harbour like a page soaking through.

She left it there. By noon the tide had carried the colour past the breakwater, and the fishermen swore the mackerel that week were the brightest they had seen in years.