Fine line black lotus flower tattoo with a curled stem on the side of a finger on the hand, with silver rings and a bracelet nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small lotus tattoo on a finger

Fine line · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline of a lotus flower with a curled stem sits on the side of a finger, held against a dark leather surface. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink reads as a single dark tone. The hand is the main subject, with dark nail polish, a silver band ring and a wide silver bracelet with a blue face in the frame.

Fine line Botanical Hand Lotus Flower Outline Finger tattoo Small tattoo

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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, sit, the queue will move when the officer finishes his tea, and his tea takes as long as a monsoon. So I will tell you about the lotus. My grandmother told it to me at this same fence, back when the fence was only wire and a man with a dog.

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Near the river there was a pond the colour of strong coffee, and in it grew one lotus that nobody had planted. Each morning it opened its petals like a letter being unfolded by careful hands, and each night it folded them shut again, keeping whatever it had been told. The smugglers said it could hear a secret through the water. The customs men said that was nonsense told to keep people out of the reeds. Both were right, in their way.

A boy called Anil carried salt across the river in the hollow of his bicycle frame. One dry evening he knelt at the edge of the pond and asked the flower for a safe road. It gave him nothing but a single seed, pale as a fingernail. He pushed it into the mud under the bridge and went home to sleep. In the morning the soldiers came with their lamps and their dogs, and found the bridge had cracked clean through, the salt was gone, and a green stalk had grown up through the planks to the height of their knees. They argued about it for a week. Nobody crossed that bridge again.

Anil grew old and the lotus grew old with him, and now the stems run along the riverbank in a long white line. So when the officer asks what you are carrying, tell him the truth. He will look at your hands, and if they are empty, he will stamp your paper without lifting his eyes from his cup.