Black linework paisley and floral ornament with a red lotus motif tattooed along a person's ribs and side, with a navel piercing visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paisley and red lotus tattoo on ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo combines black ornamental paisley and floral scrolls curling up the side of the torso with a larger red lotus or mandala-style motif below. The black linework is fine and detailed, while the red areas are solid fills with soft edges. The photograph is a close, angled side view that runs the design from the waist up towards the ribs.

Botanical Fine line Ribs Paisley Lotus Mandala Floral Scroll Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was in the function room above the Abbey Tavern, and Morag Kerr had brought the shawl again, folded in tissue paper like a pudding nobody had asked for. "You still have it," I said. "Nobody still has anything," she said, and unfolded it across the sticky bar top, knocking a bowl of pork scratchings towards the Tennent's pumps.

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It was black paisley on cream, curls inside curls, each one tucked against the next like the scrolls on a ship's bow. In the middle sat a red lotus where the dye had bled at the edges, soft as a bruise. Her father had run the dye hall on Sneddon Row before it closed, and he mixed that red from madder and oil and a secret he took to his grave, a process that took three weeks and turned the whole street the colour of rust. He never let anyone in the room while he worked, not even the foreman.

We were fifteen when she dared me to nick a length of cloth from the store cupboard. We got caught, of course. Her father didn't shout. He just held the offcut up to the window light, looked at the lotus for a long time, and said the men who drew the old shawl patterns had never signed their work, and neither would he. Morag had kept that offcut for thirty years, folded in tissue, waiting for someone to ask.

She lifted the shawl off the bar and laid it over my forearm the way you'd hand someone a sleeping child. The red was warm where her hand had been, and the paisley curled around my wrist as if it had only been waiting for a new place to settle.