Black ink botanical lotus tattoo with ornate mandala-style detailing on a person's upper back, with a short vertical dotted line below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus with dotted line on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink lotus flower with intricate ornamental detailing sits centred on the upper back, with its petals filled with fine patterns. A vertical line of small dotted ornaments hangs beneath the flower, with the spine running down the middle of the frame. The image is in black and grey on pale skin, with a lace collar at the top and a soft, blurred background.

Botanical Back Lotus Mandala Flower Ornament Dotted line

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 ceiling rose above the Palais floor had a lotus in plaster, its petals gone grey from forty winters of cigarette smoke, and Mr Okonedo swore it was the only thing in Hebden Lane nobody had ever painted over. I swept under it every Thursday with a broom that had lost half its bristles, and I never once looked up without thinking of Irene.

Keep reading

Irene taught the Saturday beginners' waltz. She stood at the edge of the floor with a tin of chalk and drew a dotted line from the stage to the double doors, one dot for each count, so the young couples could follow it with their feet instead of their eyes. "Dots are for people who can't hear the music," she told me, and then she laughed, because she was the one who could never keep time.

The year the hall was sold, the chalk line was the last thing left. Irene came in on a Thursday with a pencil behind her ear and a sheet of tracing paper folded in her coat pocket, and she pressed a lotus onto the inside of my wrist, petals fanning out in fine ornament, a little dotted stem running down toward my palm. "Something to keep the count by," she said. I didn't understand until I saw the new rota pinned by the cloakroom, my name typed beneath the words caretaker, floor and lights.

On Thursdays I still sweep beneath the rose, counting the dots under my breath while the varnish dries on boards nobody dances on now. The lotus stays in plaster above me, and the line I drew for her runs down to the place where my pulse keeps time.