Pink lotus flower with black ornamental mandala linework and teal shading, tattooed across a person's upper back.

Lotus and mandala on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large pink lotus flower sits at the centre of a black ornamental mandala design, with pointed petals and a yellow-orange centre. The black linework includes swirls, dotted accents and leaf-like curves, and soft teal and blue shading sits behind the flower. The tattoo is centred on the upper back and fills most of the frame.

Botanical Realism Back Lotus Flower Mandala Ornament Petal Swirl Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Achterberg had been told the lotus in the Carrow Park pond would not flower again, not after the boiler failed the winter the glasshouse went cold. She stood on the wet duckboards with a bucket of silt at her feet and counted the leaves on the dark water, round green plates lying flat like coins nobody wanted. Only one bud had come up, pale and tight, still wrapped in its own sheath.

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The ironwork on the roof had been cast in 1887 by men copying, Nell suspected, a pattern book their employer had brought home from Bombay. She knew the design by heart: the teardrop finials, the curled stems, the dotted border that ran along every rib of the glass like a line of stitches. Her grandmother had called it the lotus-and-stitch. Every spring someone repainted the rails black, and every spring the paint flaked back to rust.

On the Tuesday the bud split. Nell was alone, a flask of tea going cold on the potting bench, and she watched the petals open one at a time, pink at the tips and deep rose at the base, the heart of it a slow orange glow like a lamp turned up. She did not call anyone. She fetched the long net, lifted the flower clear of the water, carried it up the steps into the warm and set it on the bench beside the tea.

By closing time it had opened fully, and the late light through the roof had turned the glass to teal. Nell wrote the date in the logbook and, beneath it in pencil, Still here. She pinned the empty sheath to the notice board beside the rota, where it stayed until autumn.