Realism tattoo of a serene Buddha face in black and grey shading with a red lotus flower beside it, on a forearm against a dark background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Buddha face and lotus on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a Buddha face with closed eyes, a urna dot on the forehead and a curled hair pattern, rendered in highly detailed black and grey shading. A pink and red lotus with a yellow centre sits in the lower left, in saturated colour. The subject fills the frame on a dark background, with the skin of the arm visible at the edges.

Realism Forearm Buddha Lotus Flower Face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down, the kettle's only just gone off, and mind the cat, she thinks she owns the good chair. You'll have heard folk say a stone face keeps its own counsel. Old Haddow behind the gasworks kept one in his yard for thirty years, a Buddha no taller than a loaf, brought home from Rangoon by a brother who never talked about the war. Nobody in Ashby Lane ever saw Haddow smile at it, but he dusted it every Sunday morning before chapel.

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Then one wet March a girl called Peggy Lunn came in off the laundry run with a lotus in a jam jar. Pink as a boiled sweet, she said, cut from the mill pond where nobody was supposed to go. She wanted it carved on the stone, of all places. Haddow said no. She came back the next Thursday, and the Thursday after that, and each time he was at his bench with a chisel no bigger than a hatpin, teasing out one tiny knot of hair at a time, while she sat on an upturned crate and watched.

It was June before he finished the eyes. He'd been at them a fortnight, and when he set the chisel down he didn't look at the girl, he looked at the Buddha. Shut, he said. Do you know why they're shut? She shook her head. Because it's seen what it needed to see, and now it can rest. Then he gave a short cough of a laugh and told her the lotus would want fresh water every week or it would go to paper.

They say the stone sat in Haddow's window for years after he died, the carved lotus beside it still holding its colour in the lamplight. Children pressed their noses to the glass to see if it was breathing. Peggy Lunn never once walked past it without shutting her own eyes first.