Lotus Tattoo Meaning: The Old Readings and the Added Ones

Where the meaning comes from

The lotus roots in the mud at the bottom of a pond. Its stem grows up through the water and the flower opens clear of the surface, clean, even though everything it grew through was not. Water runs off the leaves without wetting them. Each flower opens in the morning and closes again in the evening for a few days before it falls.

Every serious meaning attached to the lotus comes from watching that plant. If you can tell somebody the mud-to-flower picture and why it is yours, you already have the meaning, and the rest of this page is about which of the other readings you will meet are old and which are recent.

What the old traditions carry

Purity that came from somewhere difficult. In Buddhism the lotus is the mind that wakes up without leaving the world it grew in. The Buddha is drawn seated on one, and the image runs right through Buddhist art across South, East and Southeast Asia. This is the reading most lotus tattoos are reaching for, and it is the oldest.

Creation and the gods. In Hindu tradition Brahma is born from a lotus that grows from Vishnu’s navel, and Lakshmi and Saraswati are shown seated on or holding one. The lotus, padma in Sanskrit, is also how the energy centres of the body are drawn in yoga and tantra, each one a flower with a set number of petals.

The sun, and coming back. The Egyptian association with rebirth and the sun is real and very old, with one correction: the flower in Egyptian art is the blue water lily, which closes at night and opens at dawn, and it is called a lotus in English mostly by habit. That matters for a drawing as much as for a meaning, and it comes up again below.

The readings that were added later

The colour chart. White for purity, pink for the Buddha, red for compassion, blue for wisdom, purple for the mystical. Colour does carry meaning in Buddhist art, but a neat five-colour key is the work of modern lists copying one another. Choose a colour because you want it.

The bud, the half-open flower and the full bloom as stages of your life. A fair reading of the plant and a popular one. It is a convention among people who wear them, not something a tradition handed down.

“No mud, no lotus.” Often quoted as an ancient saying. It is the title of a 2014 book by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The idea is old and very Buddhist; the phrase is recent.

The lotus and unalome. The unalome comes from Buddhist yantra tattooing in Thailand and Cambodia, where it is part of a living practice with its own rules. The small fine-line version with a lotus on top is a Western tattoo design of the last fifteen years or so. Worth knowing before you choose it.

A lotus is not a water lily, and the drawing shows it

People bring a water lily as a lotus reference more often than you would think, and once the design is on skin the difference is visible to anyone who knows the plants.

• The lotus flower stands up on a stem clear of the water. A water lily floats flat on the surface.
• Lotus leaves are round and whole and often held above the water too. Water lily pads have a notch cut into them.
• The lotus has a seed pod, flat-topped with holes like a shower head, which shows in the middle of an open flower and stays after the petals fall. A water lily does not.
• Lotus petals are broad and softly pointed. Water lily petals are narrower and more numerous.

Neither is wrong for a tattoo. It is worth deciding which one you mean, because “lotus” with a notched pad and a floating flower is the version people point out.

How to choose which reading is yours

Say what it means out loud before it goes on. If what comes out is the mud and the flower and why that is your story, the tattoo is doing its job. If what comes out is a line from a colour chart, take another week.

A lotus combines easily: with water lines underneath it, with a koi below the surface, inside a mandala, with a crescent moon above it. Each addition is a second symbol with its own reading, so it is worth checking the pair says what you mean rather than two things at once.

What it is like to sit for one

The lotus is one of the most forgiving shapes to tattoo small, because the outline alone is recognisable. A single fine-line flower sits well on a wrist, an ankle, behind the ear or at the nape. Larger lotuses work on the sternum, down the spine, on the upper arm or across the thigh, where the petals have room to carry shading and the water can be drawn around them.

The sternum and spine are near the sharp end of the pain chart, and a wrist or outer upper arm is near the easy end. A small fine-line lotus is usually one short session; a shaded piece with water and a seed pod is longer, and the thin lines of a small one will want a look again within a year.