Black linework lotus mandala with pink, purple and blue watercolour splashes, tattooed on the inside of a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower with layered petals and a mandala-like centre is outlined in fine black linework, with small dots and dangling chain-like drops hanging beneath it. Soft pink, purple, blue and teal watercolour-style washes spread behind the design, giving it a loose, painterly effect. The tattoo is centred on a forearm against a dark background, with a teal sleeve at the left edge.

Botanical Fine line Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Tassel Dot Star Watercolour

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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

Put the kettle on the back ring, not the front, the front one sulks. Now. You want the story of the lotus in the Gallow Cut, or the one about the eel that stole Mr Pennick's hat? The lotus, you say. Good. It's the quieter one, and it needs a quiet listener.

Keep reading

Every spring the water in the Cut went thick and brown with clay, and nothing grew in it but reed and rot. Then came the drought summer, when the lock keepers were quarrelling over the last of the flow, and Ada Price tied her barge to the old stone wall and found a lotus opening in the muck by the sluice. Nobody believed her. Lotus don't grow on this stretch, they said. No, she told them, but they grow in the head of a woman who has nothing to look at all day but water.

The dye works upstream had been pouring its rinse into the river for forty years, and that summer the run came through pink and violet and a green like bottle glass. Ada didn't mind. She took a brush from the cabin drawer and painted what she saw: petals stacked like pages folded back on themselves, a centre drawn tight as a compass, and beneath it the little glass beads she'd strung from the awning as a girl, dropping like rain that never reached the ground.

The lock keeper came down to shout at her for trespass on the towpath. He stood a long while looking at the flower in the mud, then at the painting on her cabin roof, and then he went home without a word. In October his wife sent round a jar of bramble jelly with a blue cloth over it. That's the whole of it. Pass me that jar, would you. No, the other one, with the blue lid.