Black and grey lotus flower with cloud scrolls and a hanging ornament tattooed centrally on the sternum.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and cloud motif on the sternum

Botanical · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded lotus flower sits at the centre of the design, with layered cloud scrolls spreading out on either side and a tapering ornament hanging below. The work uses fine linework with soft grey shading in the petals and clouds, and the ink reads as dark blue-black against the skin. The tattoo is centred on the chest with two fingertips visible at the top corners of the frame.

Botanical Chest Lotus Cloud Ornament Scroll Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mei-ling's brush hung over the palette while the cobalt pooled in the well like ink from a squid. Master Tan had told her twice that morning that cobalt would not be hurried. She had painted scrolls for six years, and still her clouds came out lumpy, stacked like cabbage leaves on a market stall. She wanted one clean curl before the light went.

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The kiln was opened at dusk. The lotus on the bowl had been shaded with thin grey washes, dozens of them, each one laid down and breathed on until the petals seemed to lift off the glaze. Master Tan turned the bowl over under the lamp and grunted. "Too much grey. It looks like it's drowning." He reached for the cracked saucer to smash, but she caught his sleeve and pointed at the clouds. They were dark and even, rolling in from the rim like weather. He let her keep the bowl, and said nothing about it for a week.

The salt boat for Haiyan Bay left the quay before dawn. A sailor with no teeth at the front of his mouth paid three coins for the bowl, wrapped in straw, and promised to bring it back full of the sea's best rice. Mei-ling did not expect to see it again. Years later a letter came up the river from the coast, written by a cook who had kept the bowl in his galley. He wrote that the petals had worn to the colour of wet slate, and that when the sun came low over the water, the clouds turned the same blue as the sea, so that nobody aboard could tell where one ended.