Small black outline lotus tattoo in a fine line botanical style on the side of an ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Outline lotus on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower is drawn in a single black outline, with five or six pointed petals fanning upwards from a shared base. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the ink sits crisply on pale skin. The tattoo is centred in the frame against a soft, out-of-focus background, with the foot and ankle filling most of the image.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Lotus Flower Petal Outline

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 pit closed the spring I turned fifteen, and by August the water had seeped up through the old workings and filled the hollow behind the colliery wall. Nobody swam in it. Dad said the bottom was full of rail sleepers and bicycle frames, and that the water had a colour he didn't trust. Still, Mrs Okonedo from chapel started walking her terrier round the rim every evening, and after that the rest of us followed, because a mining village can never leave a forbidden thing alone for long.

Keep reading

The flowers came in July. Nobody had planted them. Someone reckoned seed had lain dormant in the spoil for decades, and now there were pale pink heads standing clear of the black water, their broad leaves lying flat as dinner plates. We called them the lilies until Gran corrected us. Lotus, she said. The sort that open clean out of mud. She had seen a picture of one in a book from the Co-op when she was a girl and had never forgotten the word.

On the last Sunday of the month she went down the bank in her slippers, holding her skirt above her knees, and waded out past the reeds while the whole street watched from the rim. She came back with one stem snapped at the root and mud to her shins. Mr Hollins, who had worked forty years underground and said almost nothing since, took off his cap and held it against his chest without a word. Gran put the flower in a jam jar on the kitchen sill and told us to leave the water alone.

In the morning the kitchen window had fogged with steam from the kettle. I drew with one finger on the glass, slowly, the outline of a lotus, its petals fanning up from a single base. The drawing held for a moment, then ran and was gone, and Gran, buttering toast behind me, said that was how it should be.