Colour tattoo of a magenta lotus, cherry blossom sprigs and orchid buds with blue watercolour drips, on the inner forearm.

Lotus and cherry blossom on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A magenta lotus bloom sits at the centre of the design, with cherry blossom sprigs and orchid buds rising above and to the right. Black outlines define the petals and flowers, while the fill uses soft, blended pink, red and purple tones. Blue watercolour-style drips run down the left side and sit beside the bloom, set against pale skin on a forearm.

Botanical Forearm Lotus Cherry blossom Orchid Flower Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mary Oddie went out before light in the hard January, as her father had, to break the skin of ice on the horse trough with the back of the axe. The farm had sold its last ewe in November, and the wind came off the moor carrying nothing but cold.

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On the ninth morning there was a woman sitting on the trough's stone lip with her boots in the snow, and she was not cold. She asked for water. Mary took the dipper from the nail by the gate and gave it to her, and the woman drank and said the trough had been kind to her. She said it would be kinder still if someone let the water run. Mary said water only froze on the cobbles if it ran, and the woman laughed and said that was the trouble with farms.

When the woman stood, there was a single lotus bloom floating in the trough, magenta and open, its petals veined like a leaf held up to the light. Pink blossom lay on the snow beneath the plum tree by the gate, though the tree had been bare since Michaelmas. Blue meltwater ran down the outside of the trough and over the stone, the first thaw Mary had seen all winter. The woman was gone, and her footprints ended at the water.

Mary broke no ice that morning. She let the water run down to the cobbles, where it froze again by dusk, and she left the lotus where it floated. Come March the plum was in leaf, the cattle drank from the trough as they always had, and the bloom was still there, pale as paper, unfrozen beneath the surface.