Small black outline lotus tattoo in a fine line botanical style on the side of a middle finger, with rings on the neighbouring fingers.

Lotus tattoo on a middle finger

Botanical · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower is drawn in black outline on the side of a middle finger, with petals rising above a scrolled base with a dot detail. The linework is thin and even, with light grey shading inside some petals. The photograph is taken close up against a plain grey-green background, with turquoise and green stone rings visible at the bottom of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Hand Lotus Flower Petal Finger

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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

Mrs Calloway ran the boarding house on Carrick Parade with two rules, no dogs after nine and no lodgers on the pier after dark, and my brother broke both within a week of arriving with a tin of Indian ink and no money. He was a sign-writer by trade, which meant he could make a single letter look as if it had been waiting all its life to be read.

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The lotus was his idea. He had watched one open in the ornamental pond behind the bowling green, he said, the petals folding back at first light so neatly the water never troubled them. He practised on the tide tables from the hall until Mrs Calloway threatened to take the ink away, then he set a steel nib to my middle finger and drew it in one unbroken line, stopping only to blow on the skin. "Thin and even," he said. "Like you're not trying."

By October the sea air had softened the edges and the grey had crept into the petals where he'd shaded them. He went north with the herring boats that winter and sent one postcard, which said only that the water was colder than advertised. I kept the till at the front desk and did the sums on the backs of his old tide tables, resting my hand on the ledger whenever a column came out wrong.

On the first warm morning of spring I walked down to the bowling green before the lodgers stirred. The pond was still and the flowers had not yet opened, their buds shut tight against the cold water. I waited there until the sun found the first petal, and then I went back to work, because the rent was due and the lotus, as he'd promised, would open again on its own.