Four photos of a yin yang tattoo with lotus and mandala detail, two in black and grey and two in watercolour colour, shown on the back and thigh.

Yin yang and lotus tattoos in four views

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The collage shows four photographs of the same yin yang design combined with lotus flowers and mandala patterns. The top two images show black and grey linework and shading on the upper back, with one version adding watercolour splashes in the top right, while the bottom two show colour washes in blue, orange, pink and green. The bottom left includes the words find balance written in script beside the design.

Botanical Neo-trad Back Thigh Yin yang Lotus Mandala Watercolour Script

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 have been told since childhood that the river Tavrin runs black on one bank and clear on the other, and that this is why the two dye-houses of Hollin Ford have never once shared a bridge. You belong to the black bank. Your mother's soot has stained your cuffs to the elbow, and your grandmother still spits when the clear bank's name comes up at supper.

Keep reading

One wet morning in the month the lotus opens on the millpond, a boy from the clear bank crosses with a bolt of silk folded under his arm. It has been dyed in every colour the river has ever held, the hem bleeding orange into blue into green. Pinned to it is a note in Old Pell's cramped hand: the vat is cracking, come and see for yourself. You go, with a bucket of soot on your hip and your grandmother's curses following you onto the planks.

At the far bank you find two cloths laid side by side on the drying poles. One is a curl of black ink with a pale lotus pressed into its centre. The other is the same curl in clear water, and the same lotus, waiting for the dark half that completes it. Pell has been stirring the pattern into wet cloth every day for forty years, and every day it has come out lopsided. You tip your bucket into the clear vat. The water clouds grey, then a slow ring of colour spirals outward from the middle, orange, then blue, then a green that only appears where the two halves meet.

By dusk the bridge is strung with cloth that nobody on either bank can tell apart. Pell says nothing about it. He hands you a brush, and the soot on your cuffs has finally begun to lift in the rain.