Full sleeve tattoo of a seated Buddha and lotus flowers in a watercolour style with colour splashes, shown on an upper arm and forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Buddha and lotus full sleeve

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A seated Buddha in meditation sits at the top of the arm, with lotus flowers and grass running down to the wrist. The Buddha is rendered in soft black shading and grey, while the lotus flowers and background wash are painted in pink, green and blue. Loose paint splatters and halftone dots frame the design across three views of the same arm.

Upper arm Forearm Buddha Lotus Flower Grass

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus driver lets you off where the tarmac gives up, beside a fuel drum, a tin roof and a dog that will not get up for anyone. The heat has already smudged the horizon into a grey wash. In your lap is a jam jar holding a lotus bulb wrapped in wet newspaper, and the old man at the pump told you the pond at Sadar Well still holds water if you walk east past the sign that promises nothing.

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The road turns to sand within a mile. You count telegraph poles, eleven, twelve, and then the wind gets up and writes across the ground in long grey ribbons. At the ruined wall of a shrine a stone figure sits with its eyes half closed, its robe bleached to the colour of old roses. Someone has left a marigold at its feet, dry as paper. You nod to it, because the old man said to, and keep walking.

The well is a shallow green eye in the middle of nothing. Tall grass stands at its edge like pen strokes, and the lotus leaves lie flat on the water, their flowers still folded shut. You kneel and tip the jar. Water runs over the bulb and flicks onto the sand in dark dots, a pattern you could almost fix with a stencil.

You wait. The bus will not return until Thursday, and you have stopped minding. Around sunset the first bud loosens, pink at the tips, then another beside it, until the whole pond seems to be breathing out. You realise the old man never said the flowers open for the sun. He said they open for whoever stays long enough to see it.