Back of a woman's neck with a black and yellow lotus flower tattoo on the upper back, with a dotted line and small star motifs hanging below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower sits centred on the upper back below the nape of the neck, drawn with black linework and filled with yellow and gold ink in its petals. A thin dotted line hangs from the base of the flower, with small star and cross-like geometric motifs spaced along it. The photograph is taken from behind against a plain pale background, with auburn hair pulled up and off the neck.

Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Flower Star Dotted line Geometric motif

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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 closer, you, and mind the gull with the stolen crust. Now, the lotus in the harbour pond at Gullan Cove, the one nobody planted. Nobody could say how it got there. Every spring a pale bloom came up through the silt by the slipway, and the old women said it was the drowned bell-ringer's doing, because he'd loved the water and hated the chapel.

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Old Ada Pellow kept the light at the end of the north mole, and she was the only one who ever rowed out to look at the bloom properly. She took a brass pair of dividers and a length of waxed thread, and she measured the bay the way a sailor measures a course. For every fixed light she pricked on her chart, she tied a knot in the thread. A knot for each mark, a knot for each safe channel. By midsummer the thread ran from the lamp-room window down to the water, beaded with knots like a rosary.

The storm came in October, the kind that tears boats off their moorings and leaves the lifeboat crew sick in their oilskins. Ada had gone out to the bell buoy with the thread and a gold-leaf lantern from her husband's shop. She could not see the harbour mouth through the rain, but she could feel the thread in her fingers, each knot tugging towards home. Three boats came in that night, steered by a line of gold light that looked, from the shore, like a lotus opening on black water.

The town still points at the pond in autumn. Nobody has ever found the thread, but every fisher child learns the knots, and if you ask them where the true course lies, they will point at the bloom and tell you to follow the dots.