Black and white photo of a woman seen from behind with a black geometric lotus tattoo on her upper back, with a dotted line below it.

Lotus tattoo on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with her hands in her hair is photographed from behind, showing a black lotus flower tattoo centred between her shoulder blades. The flower has layered outlined petals with a geometric, mandala-like inner detail, and a short vertical line of dots runs down from it. The image is black and white and the tattoo is set against bare skin above a white vest top.

Botanical Geometric Dotwork Back Lotus Flower Mandala Dotted line

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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

Sit nearer the stove, love, and mind the coal dust on your sleeve. This is the tale of the lotus that grew in the Hallow Cut the summer the water went down so far you could walk the towpath in your Sunday shoes. Nobody on the cut had ever seen a lotus. They want warm shallows and slow black mud, and the Hallow Cut had neither, only tins, bicycle wheels and a drowned pram.

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Old Mabel Ruddock kept the lock at Stanhope and lived aboard the narrowboat Patient Dove with a tin of tacks and a ledger. Every evening she drove one brass stud into the gunwale for each boat that passed through, and the studs ran in a straight line from the tiller towards the waterline. When the lotus came up in the shallows below the gate, it opened eight petals, then sixteen, each ringed with a second skin of petal, and the heart of it folded into circles so tight a man could not count them. Men from the council came with string and a surveyor's wheel. They measured it and went away muttering that a thing couldn't be that exact and still be alive.

Mabel took the view that the flower was keeping the cut honest. She sat on the lock beam with her feet in the cold and talked to it about her husband, who had gone down the lock one foggy night and never come up, and about the price of coal. Some folk say the lotus answered in ripples. I say only that the water stayed high enough to float the Patient Dove all that dry autumn, and that a flower which measures a river is a sensible thing to have on your side.

The rain came in October. Mabel untied the boat, pulled the last stud from the gunwale, and dropped it in the shallows where the petals had been. In the morning the lotus was gone, the cut was brimming, and the stud lay on the bottom in the clear water, pointing at nothing but the sky. Mind your cup, love. That's the whole of it.