Fine line black tattoo of a lotus flower with an om-style symbol above it, sitting on the upper back of a person with their hair tied up.

Lotus and om symbol on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph taken from behind shows a fine line tattoo centred on the upper back, just below the neck. The design stacks a stylised om-like symbol and a looping curl above an outlined lotus flower, with a tapering stem extending below. The linework is thin and uniform with no shading, and the image is in greyscale, so the ink reads as solid black.

Fine line Botanical Back Lotus Om symbol Ornament Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bell at Carrick Sound had cracked in the gale of nine winters back, so when the fog came down thick off the Skerries the Lenning boats rowed home by ear. Nobody had the heart to replace it. What they listened for instead was the hum that came off the end of the mole, low and even, the note Maud Tallis made by running a wet thumb round the rim of her copper bowl.

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Maud had no use for the bowl once her hands went stiff, so she gave it to her granddaughter Eda along with the knack of it. 'Keep it low,' Maud said, mending a net on the step. 'High notes go thin in fog. Let the note hold and let it curl back on itself, like a rope coiled on a deck. That's how the boats find it.' Eda was eleven and thought the lesson was about the bowl, not the fog.

The night the Sarn boat failed to make the harbour, Eda wrapped the bowl in her mother's shawl and walked out to the end of the mole. The water under the lamp had gone flat and grey, and pale lotus flowers from the mud flats had drifted up against the stones, open and still though the cold should have shut them. She sat down, set the bowl on her knee, and hummed until her lips ached. Out in the murk, something answered with a splash, and then another, and then the slow scrape of oars that knew the sound.

Three boats came in at first light, the Sarn boat riding low with its nets full and its crew hoarse with shouting. Maud said nothing about it. She only took the copper bowl back, turned it over, and set a single lotus flower on the step beside it. By spring the flats were full of lotus that nobody in Lenning had planted, and on still evenings you could hear the bowl's note drifting in from the water, low and patient, the way it always had.