Black botanical tattoo of a lotus flower with curling swirls on the lower torso, just above a white waistband.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and swirls on the lower torso

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black lotus flower sits at the centre of the design, with its petals partly filled and partly outlined, and two long scrolling tendrils curl out from its base. The linework is smooth and even, with the flower filled in solid black and the swirls drawn as single lines of moderate weight. The ink is black on pale skin, and the tattoo sits in the middle of the frame above a white waistband.

Botanical Other Lotus Flower Swirl Scroll Tendril

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the fern first, pressed into a slab of shale that your father has split on the stone floor of the drift mouth. Its fronds unroll like the ends of a cut ribbon, and at the centre sits a bloom the men call the water lily, though nobody in Harrow Row has seen water in the seam for forty years. Your father says the plant died under weight and heat long before the pit had a name. He wraps the slab in a flannel and gives it to you because you are the only one on the row who asks what things are for.

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The colliery whistle goes at six. You carry the shale home past the washhouses and the chapel, where the widows sit on the step and count the lamps coming up the lane. Mrs Tennant at number nine tells you to leave the stone alone, that anything dug out of the ground wants putting back. You say you will, on Sunday, after service. You do not tell her that the curl on the left of the slab still feels soft under your thumb when you hold it to the lamp, as though the frond has only just stopped moving.

On Sunday the rain comes sideways off the spoil heap. You walk up the old tub road with the slab under your coat and kneel where the rails were lifted. The black ground is cold and smells of iron. You press the fossil flat into the earth with the heel of your hand, bloom uppermost, the two tendrils fanning out like a pair of hands opening. Then you stand and brush the grit from your fingers, and the lamp you left burning in the kitchen window below the hill is the only light for miles.