Black and grey ornamental lotus tattoo on the upper back, with a swallow and a script quote below it on the lower back.

Lotus and swallow on a back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's bare back shows a large lotus flower on the upper back, built from pointed petals with detailed inner patterns and soft grey shading. Below, on the lower back, a linework swallow flies beside a line of cursive script. The image is in natural daylight, with a pink bikini strap crossing the frame.

Botanical Lettering Back Lotus Swallow Script Quote Mandala Flower Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dyke behind Hob's Lock went so still that summer the water lilies stood up out of it like cups on a saucer. Nell Thorogood counted them each morning before she opened the sluice, and each morning there were more, pale and folded, their petals layered tight as the pages of a hymn book nobody sang from any more.

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The swallow nested in the lock-house eaves, the same bird for three summers running. In June Nell began tying her letters to its leg with red wool, one a week, addressed to Tom Ashdown, who had gone down the river on a coal barge and sent nothing back but a postcard of a lighthouse with the stamp on upside down. She wrote in pencil so the rain could not run it.

Each time the bird came home, the wool was gone and a single grey-blue feather lay on the sill, ruled faintly with white like notepaper. She never learned whether Tom read them. She kept writing anyway, and the sentences grew shorter, and at the foot of every page she started the same line and never finished it, because it was the one thing her mother had said that she could not decide was true.

In October a letter came back folded into the swallow's beak, soaked through, with four words across the fold in a hand she did not know: my words are mine. Nell laid it flat on the lily pads until the ink dried. Then she shut the sluice, let the dyke rise, and watched the swallow drop onto the nearest bloom, which held it as though it had been waiting for exactly that weight.