Fine line black ink lotus flower tattoo with a vertical ornamental stem on the upper back between the shoulder blades.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower with ornamental line on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black linework lotus flower sits on the upper back, with a thin vertical stem decorated with small diamond shapes and curling tendrils running down from it. The lines are delicate and even, with light soft shading in the petals and no colour. The subject is photographed from behind, with the person's hair pinned up on the right and the tattoo centred in the frame.

Fine line Botanical Geometric Back Lotus Flower Stem Diamond Swirl Ornament

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

The brass plates came into Mablethorpe harbour in crates every second Thursday, wrapped in sacking that smelt of tar, and Aunt Ida would unpick the sacking with a penknife before anyone else touched it. She said the chandlers never knew what they were sending. Each plate was a compass rose or the name of a lifeboat, and my job was to cut the fine ground behind the letters, the lines so even you could have ruled them with a straightedge if a straightedge had any patience.

Keep reading

The commission that spring came from a widow on Quay Row who wanted a lotus cut into the lid of her husband's tobacco box. He had carried it back from Ceylon in 1911 and never once opened it, she told me, because the hinge had rusted shut. I spent three evenings on the petals alone. Ida made me work with a single hair-thin burin: the stem first, then the small diamonds spaced down its length like rivets, then the curls of tendril that ran off towards the edges as though something had been growing there in secret.

On the Friday the widow came back with the box under her arm and asked me to open it. I had no idea whether the hinge would give, but the cuts were so clean the metal had nowhere to bind, and the lid swung up without a sound. Inside, pressed flat against the green baize, lay a dried lotus, brown as old paper, and a folded note in a hand I did not know. It said only: the stem goes all the way down.

Ida read it twice, handed it back without comment and went to fill the kettle. The widow stayed until it boiled, turning the lid over in her lap and running a thumb along the diamonds. I never learned what the note meant. What I still think about is the stem itself, which I had stopped at the edge of the lid because that was where the design ended, and which she clearly felt had been left unfinished.