Large dark lotus flower tattoo with a pink centre on a person's upper back and shoulder, photographed from behind against a pale yellow background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dark lotus on the shoulder blade

Botanical · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A large lotus flower covers the shoulder blade, with layered petals shaded in deep plum and near black. A bright pink centre and touches of teal add contrast at the heart of the bloom. The photograph is taken from behind against a plain pale yellow background, with the subject wearing a white vest top.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Back Lotus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father dug the lotus out of the silt of Hobb's Drain the summer the water went brown and the eels stopped coming up the sluice. He didn't believe in anything he couldn't weigh on the mill scales, so he said someone had flung a bulb off a boat, and he tossed it on the bank with the rest of the rubbish. I was nine and I picked it up anyway, because it was the only thing near us that smelled of something other than diesel.

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I planted it in the washtub behind our cottage. Nothing came up for a fortnight. Then one night in August the leaves unrolled, dark as tar at the edges, and the centre flushed a pink so raw it looked like the inside of a mouth. Mother said it was the heat. Father said nothing, but he started sleeping with the back door open.

The flower opened only after dark and closed before the church bell struck six. Every morning there were marks on the rim of the tub, wet prints with long toes. By September the petals had gone the colour of a bruise, with teal threaded through them like light under ice, and the drain began to run clear for the first time in years.

The week the lock-keeper's boy went missing, the lotus folded itself shut and did not open again. My father walked out to the washtub at dawn and tipped it into the water, roots and all. He came back with his boots soaked to the knee and told me the drain was just a drain. I have kept the bulb in a jar since, and I still hear it knocking against the glass when the wind comes off the fen.