Reddish-brown paisley and lotus design running from the thigh down the calf to the ankle, in a henna-style pattern rather than black tattoo ink.

Paisley and lotus henna-style design on a leg

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A single leg is covered from upper thigh to ankle with an intricate paisley and floral pattern, including a large mandala-like bloom, scrolling leaves and a lotus near the knee. The linework is fine and even, filled with dot and curl detail, and the ink is a uniform warm red-brown rather than black. The design follows the curve of the leg and is photographed outdoors in dappled sunlight against grass and gravel.

Thigh Calf Ankle Paisley Mandala Lotus Flower Leaf Scroll Leg

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

Harun has been piping paste from a twist of waxed paper since the Cape, and tonight he lets you hold the lamp. The galley is hot with cloves and scorched onion, and the pale calico pinned across the hatch cover is already a field of teardrops and curling vines. He works from the top down, and when the paste dries it turns a warm red-brown, the lines so fine you forget to breathe. Every dot takes a breath, he says, so you had better not waste any.

Keep reading

Ask him why the pattern must run the full length of the cloth without a break, and he tells you about his grandmother's sari border, which ran from her shoulder to her ankle and was never finished because she died with the thread still on the loom. Her paisleys were mangoes, she said, falling in a line like a sleeve of fruit, and the lotus was where the river bent. You ask who will finish it. He shrugs at the stove. The ship will finish it, he says, somewhere past Aden, the way ships finish everything.

At Port Said the bosun takes the cloth ashore to be pressed, and you watch it go down the gangway over a stranger's shoulder. It comes back three days later with a lotus at the hem picked out in ochre by a market tailor who could not resist a flourish. Harun holds it up to the porthole, studies the new petals for a long while, and laughs. That is where the river turns, he says, and folds it away.

That night you scrape the last of the paste from the waxed paper, and rather than throw the twist over the side, you press it flat on the galley shelf and draw one small dot in the corner, the way he taught you, to see whether it holds.