A purple and lavender lotus flower tattoo with dark outlines and soft shading sits on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower on upper back

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A lotus flower with layered petals sits at the top left of the frame on smooth, warm-toned skin. Dark outlines define the petals, and purple and lavender shading gives them soft depth, with pale highlights left in the centre. The design sits off-centre with plenty of plain skin around it, which keeps the focus on the flower.

Botanical Back Lotus Flower Petal

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

Sit down, you, and mind the bucket, because I am going to tell this the way my mother told it to me, and she never once let a child stand for the good parts. Right. Listen.

Keep reading

Up past the old drift at Hollin Row there was a tip of grey shale that nothing would grow on, not nettle, not even the moss that will grow on a gatepost in hell. In the bottom of it, where the rain sat, there was a black pool the men called the Sump, and they would not drink from it. Now a seed came up that hill in the pocket of a deputy named Amos Pryce, who had been to Egypt in the war and kept a bag of things from it. Lotus, he said, the flower that opens out of the mud. Nobody believed him. He threw them in the Sump anyway, on a Sunday, because it was the only water he had left to be a fool in.

Weeks went by. The shifts went down and came up, and the cough went round the cages like a dog nobody wanted. Then one morning, before the whistle, a lass called Ivy Brough, who was seven and had no business at the pit-head at that hour, came running down the tip shouting that the water had gone purple. And it had. Five petals, then eleven, lifting up through the black like someone clearing their throat before a hymn.

The men came to look. Hard men, with their faces still cut with coal from the night before. They stood in a ring on the shale and not one of them spoke, and the flower stayed open the whole long day in the smoke, which is more than the colliery ever managed for anybody. So when they closed the Hollin shaft that winter and sent the lamps back to the stores, the men carried the lotus up to the chapel yard in a bucket. And that's where you'll find it, if you're ever daft enough to go looking: a pale knot of root in a jam jar on the windowsill, still waiting for somebody to tell it the pit's gone.