Black and magenta lotus flower tattoo with a long thin stem, placed on the side of the ribs above jeans.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower with a long stem on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower sits at the top of a long, thin stem on the side of a torso. The petals are shaded in dark grey and black, with magenta-red tints along the edges and tips. The fine stem runs down to the waistband of the jeans, and the flower is centred on the skin against a light, plain background.

Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Stem

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

Mae Corran had kept the glasshouse on Gull Steps for thirty-one years, and the lotus in the cracked stone trough by its door had never once opened for anyone but her. The harbour boys called it the black one, because the petals came up dark as wet slate and only blushed red at the tips when the light caught them right.

Keep reading

The summer the new harbourmaster arrived, he came off the ferry with a clipboard and a sunburnt neck and asked why a council glasshouse was growing a weed beside the fish-market drain. Mae put a cup of tea in his hand and told him to sit down until the tide turned. He sat. He watched the stem, thin as a fishing line, run from the trough through the rusted grate and down into the black water, where the old pilings sank into mud nobody had ever charted.

"It goes all the way to the bottom," she said. "Everything here does, sooner or later, and it has to climb back up through all of that just to get one flower into the air." He laughed, then saw she was not joking, and went quiet.

That night the tide came in green and high. In the morning the trough held a single open flower, its edges burned the colour of a boiled sweet, and the clipboard lay on the step where he had left it, unsigned.