Small fine line lotus tattoo with a dotted line above it on the base of a finger, on a hand with pink nails.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small lotus tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower sits on the base of a finger on the back of a hand, with a short dotted line running up from it. The linework is thin and the tattoo is rendered in black ink with light grey shading. The hand is centred against a plain light grey background, with pink nails and one dark nail decorated with a small white flower.

Fine line Botanical Hand Lotus Flower Dot Dotted line Hand

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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 closer, you, and mind the gull on the rail. Gerta Vell kept the chandlery on Shingle Steps, and the story goes she never once set foot in a garden. Her husband brought her a lotus seed from a trader's crate out of Lisbon, the year the mackerel failed, and told her it would only open in still water. Gerta had no still water. She had a tin bath and a bucket that leaked.

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So she planted it in the bilge trough behind the net loft, where the tide slopped in twice a day and the stink of tar hung over everything. Folk laughed. The harbourmaster said a seed like that wanted mud and patience and not much else, and Gerta said she had plenty of both. Every evening she counted the drops that fell from the pump housing onto the cobbles, one, two, three, and chalked them on the wall beside her door, a dotted line running up from the stones like a stalk that had lost its way.

It took three summers. Then one morning in August a pale bloom stood up out of the trough, cupped and stubborn, the colour of a gull's breast, and the whole quay came to look. Gerta didn't smile. She pinched a petal between two fingers to be sure it was real, then went back inside to her ledgers.

Ask at the chandlery today and they will show you the wall. The whitewash has gone grey over the years, but if the light is low you can still make out the chalk, one dot after another, still counting.