Black fine line lotus flower tattoo with dotwork accents on the side of a person's thigh, photographed in sepia tones.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower tattoo on the thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with layered petals and leaves sits centred on the side of a thigh, with a vertical line of dots above it and a row of dots beneath. The linework is fine and even, with dotwork detail in the petal centres and leaf edges, and the design is shaded in black ink only. The image is a warm sepia-toned close crop, with two hands with rings holding a light patterned fabric at the upper left.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Thigh Lotus Flower Leaves Dot 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

You are nine the summer the harbour council decides the old mill pond must go, and you are the one sent down with a rake to clear the silt before the men with the digger arrive. Nobody has told you anything grows in the black water there. Your grandmother has, but she tells everything as a warning, so you don't listen.

Keep reading

On the third morning the mud parts around a stem as thick as a pencil, and at its top a flower opens slowly, the colour of weak tea, its petals layered like the scales on a fish. Each petal has a fine edge of veining, and at the centre a cluster of seeds sits in a pale cup, each one pricked with a dot. You kneel on the planks with the tide sucking at your boots and count them, because counting is what you do when you are frightened.

That evening you carry a seed pod home in your pocket, wrapped in a sheet of tide tables with the dates printed in neat rows. Your grandmother takes one look at it and sets the kettle down. She says the pond was dug for the salt boats a hundred years ago, and that lotus only grows where someone has lost something on purpose. She doesn't say what. She asks whether you pricked the seeds, and when you say no, she says good, then go and ask the tide.

In September you plant it in a bucket on the quay wall, where the spray can reach it. It never flowers. But when the digger finally comes you are already gone with the bucket, and the marina plans stop at the edge of the wall. In the margin of the tide table someone has drawn, in fine black ink, a lotus with a line of dots above it and a line below, like a tide mark you could count your way home by.