Black and white photo of a person seen from behind, hands raised to their head, with a geometric lotus tattoo between the shoulder blades on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus tattoo on upper back

Geometric · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person seen from behind, with both hands raised to the head and dark curly hair. A lotus flower tattoo sits centrally on the upper back, drawn with fine outlines and dotted or stippled shading in black ink. The white sleeveless top and monochrome tones keep the focus on the tattoo.

Geometric Dotwork Back Lotus Flower Mandala Hair Bracelet

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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

The ferry is late again, so you walk down past the chapel of Saint Eda to the cistern behind it, where the lotuses have grown since a trader dropped roots into the rainwater tank in your grandmother's time. Mrs Fenwick says the flowers open only in the hour after sunrise, and in twelve summers you have never been up early enough to see it. Today you mean to be.

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Tamsin keeps the cistern now. She is waiting by the gate with a dried seedhead in her palm, grey and cup-shaped, its top pocked with small round holes like a pepper pot. "Count them," she says. "One seed to each hole, and each seed will sit in the mud for two hundred years if it has to, waiting for somebody to be patient enough." You count thirty-one and lose your place twice, and she laughs at you the way she laughed at your grandmother.

By the time you reach the water the sky has gone the colour of milk. The first bud is already lifting, pale at the tip and folded tight, and you crouch on the warm stones and watch it the way you have watched nothing else on Orrin. Somewhere behind you the ferry horn sounds twice. Your mother will be standing on the quay with the cardboard box of your father's things, and the boat will not wait for you.

You press the seeds into the soft mud at the edge of the pond, one by one, and the petals begin to open, slow as a hand unclenching. You let the horn go on without you.