Colour botanical tattoo of pink lotus flowers, buds and green lily pads climbing vertically along the centre of a woman's back.

Lotus and lily pad vine down the spine

Botanical · Back · Colour · Photo

A vertical vine of pink lotus flowers, closed buds and green lily pads runs down the centre of the back along the spine. The petals and leaves are shaded with soft gradients and fine dark outlines, giving a painterly, realistic finish. The pink and green tones stand out against the plain, pale skin, and the design tapers at the top and bottom of the frame.

Botanical Realism Back Lotus Flower Bud Leaf Vine Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the old vicarage had been drained twice in living memory, and each time the lotuses came back up through the silt as if nobody had asked them. Mrs Annable kept a notebook of when each bud opened. She had written in it for forty years, and her granddaughter Wren had inherited both the notebook and the habit of hiding it under the potting bench whenever a visitor came up the lane.

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That June Wren found the entry for the year her grandfather died. Two buds, closed, and beside them a single word underlined twice: wait. She sat on the upturned bucket with the book open on her knees and the lily pads ticking against each other in the breeze, and she understood that the flowers had never opened for anyone's schedule but their own.

She carried a trowel down to the water and knelt at the edge. A lily pad had come loose and was drifting toward the reeds, bent at one corner like a folded letter. Wren reached out and caught it. Where its stem had snapped, a thin green thread trailed away into the dark, and when she followed it with her eyes she saw that it ran back up the bank, along the path, through the gate, and into the kitchen where the kettle was whistling for no one. She left the trowel on the grass and went in to make the tea, two cups, and set the notebook beside the second one, open to a blank page.