Colour tattoo of pink lotus flowers and a blue bird on the abdomen, shown beside a close-up of a surgical scar with sutures.

Lotus and bird tattoo over abdominal scar

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows a vertical surgical scar with stitches running across the lower abdomen near the navel. The right panel shows a colour tattoo of pink lotus flowers, a blue bird with an orange chest and teal water splashes across the skin. Outlines are dark and fine with soft colour fills, and the design curves from the upper side of the torso down towards the lower left.

Botanical Other Lotus Flower Bird Water Scar Abdomen Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had come early to the Harrow farm that year, and the mill pond froze so hard the ducks walked across it complaining. Old Ada Penhallow went down to break the ice at the sluice every morning with a bar of ash wood, because her son had gone to the war and the water still had to reach the cattle.

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One morning under the broken ice she found a lotus, pink as a fingernail, its petals folded shut against the cold. She lifted it out, and it was warm. Behind her a bird landed on the frozen rail, blue across the back and rust-red at the breast, and it looked at her as if she owed it money.

"You've no business here in January," she told it. The bird shook out its feathers and flew to the far bank, and where its wings had beaten the air a thin spray of water hung and turned to glass.

She carried the flower home inside her coat and set it in a jug on the windowsill. Every day the bird came back and sat on the sill, and every day she broke the ice a little further than she needed to, so the water ran clear across the field for the cattle and the bird could drink. By February the lotus had opened into three pink cups, and the ice around the sluice had gone soft.

When the telegram came in March, Ada read it standing at the window. She folded it twice and slid it into the jug beside the flower, under the water, and went out to break the ice. The bird was already on the rail, waiting.