Black line tattoo of a lotus flower with geometric petal detail on the upper arm of a person wearing a ribbed light blue crop top and denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus tattoo on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close crop of a torso and upper arm showing a black line tattoo of a lotus flower with layered, geometric petals on the outer upper arm. A second small, faint tattoo is visible at the lower edge of the frame. The linework is fine and even, with no colour, and the soft, natural light falls across a pale ribbed top and light denim shorts.

Botanical Fine line Upper arm Lotus Flower Mandala 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

The master drew with a bronze compass that had belonged to his father, and he never let me touch it until the summer I turned fifteen. Pharaoh's surveyors had sent word that the new granary at Thebes must sit square to the river, and the whole workshop was bent over reed sheets, scratching lines that would become stone. I had spent three months ruling grids for other men's work. Then the master dropped a sheet of papyrus on my bench and told me to draw a lotus, the way the old sculptors did, with every petal answering the one beside it.

Keep reading

I started at the centre, where the seed head sat like a small sun. The compass point bit the reed and I drew a ring, then another, each one a fraction smaller, until the rings became the petals. Each petal was cut from a circle folded inside the last. My hand shook at the outer edge where the petals flared, so I rubbed a line out with pumice and began again. By dusk I had three layers of points lying open on the sheet, sharp as spear tips, and every one of them touched the same imaginary circle.

The master held it up to the lamp and said nothing for a long time. Then he laid it over the granary plan, turned it until one petal lined up with the river's bend, and pressed his thumb to the next. "Measure from here," he said. "The flower knows the angle. We only had to learn it from her." I measured. The stone cut from that plan sat exactly true to the water, and my lotus was folded into the archive beside it.

Each dusk since, I walk past that granary and count its corners against the flower in my pouch, and they have never once disagreed.