Black outline lotus flower tattoo in fine line on an ankle, with no shading or colour.

Outline lotus flower on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A single lotus flower is drawn in black outline, with five or six pointed petals fanning out from a shared base. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the design sits small and centred on the skin. The ink is solid black against a warm skin tone, and the background shows a teal wall and a tiled floor.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Lotus Flower

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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 down, the lot of you, and mind the kettle, because I'm coming to the bit about the basin. Mrs Orme kept Seacrest on the front at Halsey Bay for thirty-one summers, and the only thing she would never sell was the stone basin in the back yard, the one her late husband's grandfather brought back from a voyage east. Nothing grew in it but rainwater and gulls' feathers until the spring a lodger named Tobias Quayle tipped in a jar of pond mud he'd dug from a ditch on the marsh road.

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The seed came up pale and sulky. Mrs Orme said it would die by August, and it nearly did, what with the salt wind off the harbour and the cats taking an interest. Then one morning there was a single bud standing out of the brown water, shut tight like a fist, and every lodger in the house came down in their dressing gowns to look at it. Quayle wept, which I thought was daft.

By the back end of September the flower had opened into six pointed petals, each one drawn as clean as a line in a ledger, with no colour in them at all, only the shape. Mrs Orme said that was how you knew it was honest. She had lost a husband to the sea and a son to the war, and she said a plant that would bloom with nothing to paint it was a plant that had made its peace.

Then the winter gale came in off the bay and took the roof off the wash house, and when they went out to see to the basin in the morning, the water was gone. Not spilled. Gone. On the cold flagstones, drying in a neat ring, was the dark outline of the flower, petal for petal, as if someone had traced it in ink. Mrs Orme laid her hand on it and said, well, that's where it went. She never filled the basin again.