Colour tattoo of a pink and orange lotus flower with blue shading and black mandala linework on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower with mandala linework on the side

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large pink and orange lotus flower sits at the centre of the design, with soft yellow highlights and fine speckled shading on the petals. Behind it, blue shading fills the mandala-style background, surrounded by black paisley scrolls, dotted lines and small heart-shaped motifs. The design fills most of the frame on the side of the body, with a white cloth and a yellow garment visible at the lower edge.

Botanical Neo-trad Ribs Lotus Flower Mandala Paisley Heart 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

Her father dug the same seam for thirty years and never once saw the pond at the bottom of the hollow, though the children of Scarth Row swore it was there. Water came up through the old workings after the rains, black and still, and by midsummer something pale opened on it. Nobody planted it. The men said it was a lotus, a word from a book the schoolmaster kept locked in his drawer, and the women said it was only a rose that had lost its way.

Keep reading

When the pit flooded in the winter of the long strike, the cage stuck two hundred feet down with eleven men inside. The wives walked up to the hollow every morning with bread and nothing else, because there was nothing else. On the ninth morning Ada Brierley, who had buried a husband and two brothers, knelt at the edge and saw that the flower had turned to face the shaft, the way sunflowers turn to the sun.

She said nothing to anyone. She took a length of red wool from her apron and tied one end to the iron railing, then sang the only hymn her mother knew, badly, into the dark. Below, a knock came back, then another, regular as a clock. They tapped the answer along the pipe until the rescue crew heard it at dawn.

The eleven came up grey and blinking. The pond was gone by spring, drained by the new pumps, but Ada kept a dried petal pressed in her Bible. When the travelling man came through for the fair, she had him draw the flower on the inside of her arm in ink, with a ring of small dots around it, one for every man she had counted home.