Colour lotus flowers with grey paisley and mandala linework tattooed across a side hip and onto the buttock.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and paisley tattoo on hip and buttock

Botanical · Other · Mixed · Photo

A close side view of a hip and buttock with a tattoo of pink and red lotus blooms and a bud, combined with grey paisley swirls and a mandala motif. The linework is dark and fine, with soft grey shading filling the paisley and the leaves. Colour is concentrated in the lotus petals and the mandala, and the design wraps around the curve of the body.

Botanical Other Lotus Flower Paisley Mandala Swirl Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dye vat behind the works has gone the colour of weak tea since Monday, and Mr Hargreaves has sent you down with a bucket to find out why. You find the lotus first, or what is left of one: a pale pink bloom turning slowly against the reeds, its petals bruised by the cold. Nobody in Carrick Bridge grows lotuses. The pedlar who sold you the seeds last spring said they open only for people who wait long enough to be disappointed.

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You have been waiting since you were fourteen, standing at the printing table with a tin of carved wooden blocks that belonged to your grandmother. Most are plain: teardrops with curled tails, the paisley shapes the Kashmir shawls were made with before anyone in Lancashire had heard of them. The brass-rimmed one is a mandala, a ring of petals inside a ring of dots, and she never let anyone print with it. You have never asked why. You have only noticed how carefully she wrapped it in newspaper.

On Friday you press the bud-shaped block into the indigo, lift it, and lay the cloth flat. The paisley comes out grey where the dye has soaked, and the bloom comes out rose where the vat has been mixed with the madder you dug from the lane. Mr Hargreaves stands over the bolt with his hands behind his back and says it will never sell. Then he pays for the whole length and asks you to make another.

By the end of the month the vat runs clear, and when you walk past the pond the lotus is open on the water, pink as a struck match, as if it had only ever been waiting for the right hands to notice it.