Black line drawing of a hamsa hand with a lotus flower in its centre, drawn as a tattoo design on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hamsa hand with lotus flower design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a stylised hamsa hand, with the fingers shown as curling, tapered strokes at the top. A five-petal lotus flower sits in the palm, with a long curling stem running down from the base of the hand. The linework is solid black on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Hamsa Hand Lotus Flower Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman would not take a child across the canal without a charm against the water, and Hanno had none, only a fistful of wet sand and a face already winding up to scream. I unhooked the bronze hand from my cord. Aunt Sefu had cast it the spring the flood took our bean field: a palm with five curling fingers and a lotus opened in its centre, the stem running down the wrist like a thread of river. Hanno turned it over in the light as though he were a magistrate checking a seal, then pressed it back into my fingers and nodded, satisfied.

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"Keep it," I said, though I had only meant to lend it. Sefu used to tell me the lotus grows out of the mud, its stem reaching down into the silt while the bloom lifts clear above the water each morning. I had never believed her. The flower looked too pale to belong to anything so dirty. But I had watched the buds on the canal wall close at dusk and open again at dawn, and I had begun to think the stem did the hard part, holding on in the dark.

At dusk the ferryman poled me back over, grumbling about the price of pitch. The boy's mother had sent a loaf and a dried fish wrapped in a cloth that smelled of smoke and of the reed bed where Hanno had hidden with his new charm. I thought of him asleep on the far bank with the bronze palm tucked under his chin.

When I reached for my cord I found something hard pressed into my palm: a lotus seed, black as a river stone, with a thumbprint of canal mud still on it. Hanno had kept it for me. I planted it on the wall that night, and by midsummer the stem had found the water.