Two side-by-side photos of a fine line black lotus flower tattoo with three dots above it on the inner wrist and forearm.

Lotus outline on inner wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows two close photographs of the same single black lotus flower tattoo, with a short vertical line of dots above it and a few dots below on the left image. The lotus is drawn in thin, even black linework with no shading, and the petals are layered to show overlapping edges. The left photo shows a hand with red nail polish in a car interior, and the right photo shows the wrist resting on a cream knitted sleeve against a dark background.

Fine line Forearm Lotus Flower Dot

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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

Pull your stool nearer the stove, love, it's only warm on this side of the cabin. You've come about the flower on the water, have you? Everyone asks about the flower. Nobody ever asks about the dots.

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The flower was Ida Marsh's doing. She was a lock-keeper's girl on the Grand Union, all elbows and wet boots, and the winter the cut froze solid she found a bargeman called Tom Pelling sitting on the weir with his feet in the sluice. He had a pale lotus pressed in a tin, picked from a pond nobody else could find, and he'd sworn he'd draw it on the first clear morning. Ida said she'd hold him to it. She had a pencil stub and no paper, so she drew it on the frost of the lock-house window instead, petal over petal, with the points curling out like the lids of sleepy eyes.

Tom laughed and said the dots were stepping stones, one for every lock he'd worked through that year, and she should keep count. Then the thaw came early and the river took his barge through the gate with nobody aboard but a tin and a cat. Ida went down the towpath every morning after, counting dots on the bank where his footprints had been, until there were seven below the flower and only the frost left to finish it.

So that's your tattoo, the flower and its little ladder. The drawing never said who was waiting at the bottom of the ladder. Some say it was Tom. I say it was the water, and the water kept the tin.