Black and grey pencil-style sketch of a lotus flower with an Om symbol above it and dotted swirl accents, drawn on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Lotus and Om symbol design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a stylised lotus flower with layered petals, each with curled inner swirls, rising from a central bud. An Om symbol sits above the flower, with thin wispy lines and small dots framing the composition. The shading is soft and pencil-like on a plain white background, with the design centred and no skin visible.

Botanical Lotus Om symbol Swirl Dot Petal Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been up the stepladder since seven, scraping cream paint from the plaster rose in room four, and the wind comes through the sash in long cold breaths that smell of weed and diesel. Mrs Okonedo, who has kept Gull Crest on Marrow Parade for thirty-one years, says the rose was cast in 1908 and painted over four times, and each coat has buried a little more of its petals.

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Under the fourth coat the petals come up sharp: layered, each one curled at the tip like a wave turning back on itself. At the centre sits a bud pressed hard into the plaster, and above it, where the ceiling meets the cornice, someone has scratched a looped mark with a hatpin, a shape like a figure drawing breath, with a single dot above. Mrs Okonedo goes quiet. The room was let one winter to a widow who sat by the window each morning drawing the same flower on the backs of rent receipts, and who would not say what the mark meant.

You find the receipts in a biscuit tin wedged under the bed slats. There are dozens, pencil lotuses growing out of the margins, smoke lifting from their petals, small dots scattered like salt. On the last one, dated the week she left, there is no flower at all, only the dot and the loop, and beneath them, in careful capitals, STAY ON THE SAND, IT HOLDS.

You leave the cream on the petals and tell Mrs Okonedo the rose will do as it is. That evening, when the tide drains off the flats, you walk out with the receipt in your coat pocket and find the loop drawn in the wet sand, clean and unhurried, its dot beside it. You stand inside it until the water comes back over the edges, one line at a time.