Black and grey fine line tattoo of a vertical unalome spiral above a lotus flower with dotted detail, placed on the upper chest.

Unalome and lotus on the upper chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A single vertical line rises from a lotus flower at the bottom, passing through a spiral and a stack of looped infinity-style curves, and ends in a few dots at the top. The lotus base has outlined petals, shaded inner petals and a dotted border with small teardrop shapes hanging below. The tattoo is in black ink only, with clean, even linework on smooth skin, and is centred on the photograph.

Fine line Dotwork Chest Unalome Lotus Spiral Dot Teardrop Mandala Line

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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

Come closer, the lot of you, and mind the lamp, it has a temper like my late husband. You want the old tale of the Climb? Then sit. This is the one my grandmother told me in the pump-house on Ceres Deep, back when the water still came up warm from the bottom of the world.

Keep reading

There was a pond at the foot of the Spire where nothing grew but reeds and a stubborn pink flower the engineers called lotus, because somebody's grandmother had once owned a book about them. Out of that grey mud it rose every morning, clean as a bell. Mira Okonkwo-Vale, who kept the pumps, decided she would climb from that pond to the top of the Spire without once stepping off the line.

She did it the way you would walk a rope in the dark. Up through the coil, where the cable turns back on itself, loop after loop, a figure of eight laid on its side, over and over. Her boots rang on the rungs. Each loop, she said, was a place where she had to choose again to keep climbing, and the choosing was the whole of the work.

At the top the line thins to a single thread and breaks into little dots like sparks off a welder's rod. There was a hatch there, and past the hatch the dark that everyone is afraid of. Mira stood before it a long while. Then she turned round and climbed back down, because the dots, she said, were not an ending. They were the place where you hang your lamp for whoever comes next.