Close photo of a blue lotus tattoo with purple shading beside black fine-line cursive script reading spira volens on the inner forearm.

Blue lotus and script on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A blue lotus flower with purple shading sits at the left, with a thin black cursive script running from its stem across the forearm. The lotus has solid blue colour with darker purple toward the centre, while the script is in fine black linework. The skin is pale against a red background, and the tattoo fills the centre of the frame.

Lettering Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Float the lotus before the car comes up the drive, not after. Once the guests see it they will want to lift it out and hold it, and a blue bloom held in a damp palm for a photograph will be brown by Sunday. You know this. You have already moved the bath twice, from the marquee into the orangery and back again when the wind got under the awning. Your uncle Dennis would have grumbled at both moves. He bought that tin bath off a scrapyard in Goole in 1974 and filled it with pond silt he carried home on the bus in a feed sack.

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The lotus came from a nursery in Spalding that shut the year after. Dennis kept one tuber alive for thirty years by wrapping it in wet newspaper each winter and keeping it under the stairs, where your aunt said it sulked. The card on the table beside the bath is in his square capitals, copied from the back of an old seed packet: SPIRA VOLENS. Breathe, willing. Nobody at the reception will know what it means, and you have decided that is fine.

The vicar, who has a soft spot for gardens, asks you at the lychgate whether the flower is a symbol. You tell him it is more of an instruction. Then the bride's cousin comes round the corner with a glass of prosecco and asks whether the blue is real. You say yes. She says it looks painted on, which is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about Dennis's work, though she did not mean it that way.

When the music starts you slip away to the orangery. The water is still and the bloom has opened in the warmth off the glass. You sit on the crate he used for his tea and breathe slowly, the way he taught you before you cut anything, until the surface settles enough to hold your own face looking back at you above the petals.