Before and after photo of a colour tattoo of a blue bird and pink lotus flowers covering a raised scar on the abdomen.

Lotus and bird cover-up over an abdominal scar

Botanical · Other · Colour · Photo

The left panel shows a raised, healed scar running down the abdomen, with stitch marks and the navel visible. The right panel shows the same area covered by a colour tattoo of a blue bird with an orange throat, pink lotus flowers, green leaves and turquoise splashes. The soft, painterly shading and bright colour fill the scar area, and the two panels sit side by side for comparison.

Botanical Other Lotus Bird Flower Leaves Scar Before and after Abdomen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tomas, the blue bird with the orange throat has taken to sitting on the net drying frame outside the chandlery. Mr Okonedo says it is a sign the herring are coming back. I say it is only hungry. I have been feeding it crumbs from the bakery on Gull Street, and it has begun to watch me the way you used to watch the tide tables, as though I might be about to tell it something important.

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The lotus seeds came in the tin you left under the stairs, the one with the cranes painted on the lid. I planted them in the cracked stone trough behind the ferry office, though I knew the salt would finish them off. Two came up anyway. Pink, floppy things that open in the morning and fold shut by noon, as if they are only lent to us for a few hours. Mrs Pell says it is bad luck to grow what does not belong to the harbour. I told her the harbour belongs to nobody, which is more or less what you said the day you left.

Last Thursday the bird came down to the trough and drank from a puddle between the stems. I stood very still, hardly breathing, and it looked straight at me before lifting off over the breakwater towards open water. I thought of the Mary Ann, your little boat, somewhere past the Skerries by now.

Come home when the weather turns. The bird will be gone by then, I expect, and the flowers will have given up. But the trough is still there, and I have left a space beside it for you to stand.