Small black outline tattoo of a lotus flower with five petals on the ankle, in a fine line botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small outline lotus flower on the ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower with five pointed petals and a flat base is drawn in a single black outline on the ankle. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the design sits alone against plain skin. The photograph is taken close up on a light blue towel, with the wearer's dark trouser hem visible at the top of the frame.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Lotus Flower Petal

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

You find it the morning after the gale, when the tarn behind the salt pans has been flattened by wind and the reeds lie down like wet dogs. Your uncle Teodor says nothing grows in that water but eels and bitterness, and he has said so every spring since you came over on the ferry with one suitcase and a cough. But there it is, a single flower standing up out of the brown water, five pointed petals held flat at the base like a hand half open.

Keep reading

You crouch on the planks with your sleeves rolled and count the petals twice. The ferry horn sounds from the north quay, two short blasts, which means the mail boat is early and the salt-buyer is on it. Your uncle wants the pans raked before he arrives. You know you should go. Instead you lean out with the rake handle and hook the stem, and the water runs off it in silver threads, and you think of your mother, who drew birds on the backs of ledgers and never once drew a flower.

When you carry it up the path the petals begin to fold, slowly, the way a letter is folded by someone who has changed their mind twice. By the time you reach the gate it is half closed. Your uncle is at the pans with the buyer, his hat pushed back, and when he sees what you hold he goes quiet, the way he does when the sea surprises him.

He does not scold you. He takes the flower, looks at the base, and says the buyer will be furious and the pans will be rake-marked for a week. Then he props it in a jar of tank water on the sill, and by evening it has opened again, wide and pale, for nobody but the two of you. You keep the jar on that sill until the ferry comes back, and you never tell him that you had not been looking for it at all.