Black dotwork lotus with fine line swirls and a long stem running down the inner forearm towards the wrist.

Dotwork lotus and swirl stem on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A dotwork lotus flower with layered petals sits at the top of the design, with stippled shading inside the petals and bold outlines. Below it, fine line swirls, a thin stem and a curling, hatched element run down towards the wrist. The ink is black only, set against a plain dark background with a cropped view of the wearer's torso and thigh.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Lotus Mandala Flower Swirl Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Shush now, and mind the gravy boat, because Mrs Pardoe has never once forgiven me for the last one. Sit by the window where the sea shows through the net curtains. This is about the year the scullery sink grew a flower.

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Nell Saltcote was fourteen that spring, and her mother kept the boarding house on Wenlow Parade with more rules than rooms. Then Tobias Hale came back off the Calcutta boat with a sailor's tin rattling in his coat, and inside it, wrapped in a scrap of oilcloth, was a dried seed pod the size of a thimble. He said a man on the quay had sworn it would open if you kept it wet and kept it quiet. So Nell sat it in a cracked basin of rainwater beside the sink, and every morning before the porridge she pricked a single dot into the back of a ledger page with her darning needle, one for each day it did nothing.

Nobody believed in it, least of all the seed. By February there were four hundred dots and nothing but a green nub. Her mother wanted the basin for mopping. Nell would not give it up.

Then the surveyor's letter came, saying the house would be sold to a company that meant to knock it down for flats, and the whole street went quiet as a chapel. That morning Nell came down early and found the pod split open, a dark flower standing up out of the rainwater like a lamp. Every petal was ringed with tiny stippled marks, the same as her ledger. Her mother stood in the doorway with the broom and said nothing at all, which in our family counted as a miracle.

The house is still standing. You can see the basin on the windowsill upstairs, if you ask Mrs Pardoe nicely.