Two hand-drawn lotus flower designs in brown marker on white paper, one densely patterned with paisley-style detail and one outlined with open petals and dots, suitable as tattoo flash.

Two lotus flower designs in brown marker

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

Two lotus flower designs are drawn stacked vertically on white paper in brown marker. The upper lotus has layered petals filled with dotted, scrolled and paisley-style patterning, while the lower lotus uses bold outlines, open petal shapes and small dots scattered around it. The linework is even and the ink is a single flat brown, with no shading beyond the solid filled petal tips.

Botanical Lotus Flower Paisley Dot Petal Scroll

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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

The snow came down the Kessar Pass a week early, and by the second bend your mule had stopped refusing and started simply sitting. You untie the parcels from the saddle one at a time and check them against the list your aunt pinned inside your coat. Brown paste in paper cones, boiled from the grey shrub that grows only above the tree line. She told you never to sell it before the thaw, and never to carry it over the pass without giving some away.

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At the chorten below the summit, an old monk called Pemba is sweeping frost off a flat stone with a broom of birch twigs. Carved into the rock is a lotus, its upper petals packed with tiny scrolls and dots, its lower bowl left open. He watches you unwrap a cone and says nothing until you press the tip to the paper he keeps tacked to the shrine post. Your first line wobbles. The second holds. He nods at the dots as though they were the only part that mattered.

'The top flower is for people climbing,' he says, 'so they can count the dots and forget their lungs hurt.' You have been counting packets, not steps, and you realise the list in your coat has no column for kindness. You empty the cones into the carved bowl and watch the paste soften and bleed into the grooves, brown on grey, the way ink takes on wet paper.

By morning the wind has cleared the road and the mule is on its feet. The stone is still there, and so is the stain: a dark lotus with its petals running into the snow, too stubborn for any broom to lift.