Black and grey lotus flower within a mandala and lace pattern across a woman's upper back, with a paisley motif below and tattooing on her upper arm.

Lotus and mandala across upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large lotus flower sits at the centre of a layered mandala and lace-like pattern across the upper back, topped by a small rosette and finished with a paisley motif below. The linework is crisp, with the petals shaded in soft grey tones against darker ornamental detailing. The symmetrical composition is centred on the spine, with more tattooing visible on the upper arm.

Botanical Geometric Back Upper arm Lotus Mandala Lace pattern Paisley Rosette Script Sleeve Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Mercy Hale kept the walled garden behind the mill, and she would not let anyone plant a thing until the moon had gone round the wall three times. Her son Tobias thought this was foolishness. He said so every spring, leaning on the gate with his cap pushed back, watching her lay out the beds in rings of clay and river stone.

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The stranger came in the thaw, a thin man with a sack of seeds he would not open. He asked for bread and a bed in the shed, and in return he gave her one grey seed the size of a thumbnail, curled at one end like a fern's first leaf. Plant it in the pond, he said, where the water is stillest, and do not look at it until the lace of frost is off the rim. She nodded, because she was too old to argue with strangers who knew the weather.

Tobias laughed, and then he stopped laughing. The seed sat in the pond for nine days and nothing came. On the tenth morning a single lotus stood up from the black water, its petals folded tight, and beneath it the leaves opened in rings that no one had drawn. The mill wheel stopped. Every bird in the lime trees fell silent.

Mercy went out with her shawl over her head and found the shed empty but for a pile of paper sheets, each one a copy of that flower, shaded grey where the light fell. She folded one into her apron. Tobias never found the sack. When he asked her what the stranger had been, she only pressed the rest of the paper into the soil at the pond's edge and said that a garden is a kind of drawing, and some drawings need the water to finish them.