Black and grey lotus flower with paisley and mandala-style scrollwork tattooed on the side of a hip above a pink waistband.

Lotus and paisley tattoo on the hip

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large botanical design of a lotus flower at the centre, surrounded by paisley-shaped leaves, dotted scrollwork and rounded mandala-style motifs. The linework is dark and fairly bold, with soft grey shading on the petals and leaves giving them depth. The design sweeps diagonally across the skin, with the flower sitting low and the paisley shapes fanning out to the upper left and right.

Botanical Other Lotus Flower Paisley Mandala Leaves Scrollwork Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad painted the cabin side every spring, the week after the locks reopened and before the first hire boats came up from Braunston. He never once let me hold the brush. I sat on the gunwale with a jam jar of turps and watched him work out the paisleys freehand, his tongue between his teeth, saying nothing while the water slapped under us.

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The lotus was the hard one. Mum had seen it on a shawl at a Camden market stall the year before she left, and she talked him into putting it on the rose and castle panel above the tiller. He said flowers that grow out of mud had no business on a working boat. She said that was exactly why. He painted it anyway, petal by petal, shading the lower leaves grey so they looked like they were sinking a little into the paint.

Mum didn't come back for the spring launch that year, nor the next. I stopped asking when she'd be down. Then one April I came round the bend at Hillmorton and saw the boat tied up with someone else's washing strung across the roof, and the lotus still there, a bit faded at the edges, the new owner having kept it rather than sand it off.

I stood on the towpath a long time. The paisleys fanned out over the cabin like a hand of cards, and the shadows on the petals had gone soft in the rain. Dad would have wanted it scraped. I found I didn't.