Black fine line lotus with dotted accents and the word Namaste in script on the back of a lower leg above the ankle.

Lotus and Namaste script on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black lotus flower with layered petals sits above a small line of script reading Namaste, with a few single dots beneath as accents. The linework is fine and even, with some dotted shading, and the design is in black ink only. The photo shows the back of the lower leg and ankle in green sneakers and an ankle chain, with the tattoo centred in the frame against a plain pale background.

Botanical Lettering Ankle Lotus Script Mandala Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drought had turned the reservoir at Carrow Hollow into a bowl of cracked mud, and Senna Vale was sent down the steps at dawn with a lantern, a sack and orders from the water-warden to bring back anything still alive. Her uncle said there would be nothing. There was one lotus, half buried, its outer petals gone grey, its centre still a tight dark cup.

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She knelt in the silt and dug round its stem with the spoon her mother used for pickling plums. The mud smelled of iron and old rain. Layer by layer the petals came clear, each one ridged like the folds of a fan, and she counted them the way her grandmother counted stitches: five at the base, then a second ring, then a third, the points sharp enough to prick. Below the bloom a seam of dark dots ran through the clay where the water had once stood at its highest mark, and she tapped them with her thumb as she passed, the way people touch a doorframe for luck.

When the sluice horn sounded at the top of the steps she had only a handful of mud-caked stem in her fist. The warden met her at the lip of the bowl with his hands folded. She did not offer him the lotus. Instead she held it up to the grey sky and said the word the river-folk used at their thresholds, because her grandmother had taught her that you greet what you cannot keep. Namaste.

The gates opened. Water came down the channel in a brown tongue, then clear, and by evening the reservoir had a skin of silver. Senna set the bloom in a clay bowl on the sill of the warden's office. By morning three new buds had broken the surface, and she sat at the window with the spoon in her lap and watched them open one petal at a time.