Japanese dragon and lotus flash design

In my grandmother's time there was a boatbuilder's daughter called Mairead Fenn who kept a pot of lotus on her windowsill, pink at the edges, got from a Dutch trader who swore they'd bloom in salt water if you were patient. Nobody was patient. Then the big storm came in off the Minch, the one that took the lower wall of the chapel, and the sea came over the breakwater with a sound like a cart full of slates. Out of the foam, Mairead said, rose a dragon with a lion's face, all mane and scowl, its body coiling up through the spray like smoke off a doused fire. It wasn't angry. It was carrying something.

The something was a bud wrapped in weed, torn from the drowned garden under the old abbey. The dragon set it down on the step of this very tower, and it opened in the lamp's glow, two white blooms and a third still shut tight. Then it turned its long head towards the horizon and slid back under, the water folding over it like a lid on a pan.

Mairead kept the pot. The lotus she planted that spring took root in the cracks of the rock, and every August the waves come up pink at dawn, and nobody in this village argues with the colour. That's the story. Pass me the kettle, and mind the step.