Black and grey back tattoo in a Japanese style, with a central lotus flower, a moth, a serpent and swirling clouds across the full back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Full back piece with lotus and moth

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece covers most of the upper and lower back, centred on a lotus-style flower with a moth below it and a serpent-like form at the lower left. Swirling wind or cloud motifs and dense ornamental filigree fill the surrounding skin, with a circular emblem on the upper left. Smooth black and grey shading gives strong contrast and depth across the whole composition.

Japanese Botanical Back Lotus Flower Moth Serpent Swirl Cloud Filigree Ornament Emblem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tomas kept the sluice gate at Harrow Weir, and every evening the mist came up off the water and climbed the reeds like something looking for a door. His daughter Nell brought him his tea in a dented tin cup and often found him talking to the lotus pool below the mill, the one nobody had planted.

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The serpent that lived under the weir had been there longer than the mill. Tomas said it rose in wet years to look at the sky, and that its coils were the same grey as the cloud banks rolling in from the moor. Nell didn't believe him until the autumn the gate jammed, the river rose so fast the lower meadow turned to sheets of silver, and a moth the size of a hand came beating out of the spray, wings dusted with pale powder, and settled on the lever as if it had been waiting for someone to pull it.

Nell pulled. The gate groaned, the water dropped, and the serpent slid back beneath the pool with a sound like wet cloth tearing slowly. Tomas said nothing about the moth. He only nodded at the lotus, which had opened in the dark, a white head above the black water, its petals curled at the edges as if the wind had shaped them by hand.

The next morning the moth was gone and the lotus had closed. Nell found the tea tin on the step, full of river water, and a single silver scale caught on the lever. She kept it in her pocket for the rest of her life, and whenever the mist climbed the reeds she went down to the pool and waited for the wind to turn.