Black and grey fine line tattoo of a lotus flower with a spiral unalome line above and an infinity loop below, placed on a forearm.

Lotus and unalome on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower sits at the centre of the design, with its petals outlined in fine black linework and lightly stippled with dots for shading. A wavy unalome line rises above the flower and a looped infinity-style knot with a dotted tail hangs below it, all on a pale forearm against a dark background. The image is a close, straight-on photograph in black and grey with even composition.

Fine line Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Unalome Infinity Spiral Flower Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mother Hesketh had walked the path from the mill pond to the beeches every morning for forty years, and every morning it had bent a little further from the straight line her husband had pegged out. Ruth, her granddaughter, stood at the water's edge with a bucket of eels she had no wish to carry and said the path was lying. The old woman only laughed and told her the path went where the ground let it.

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The lotus came up in the pond that spring, which nobody in Coldharbour had seen before, a white bud on a stalk as thick as a thumb. Ruth wanted to pull it out by the roots. Mother Hesketh took a length of tarred cord from her apron, tied it into a loop with no beginning and no end, and dropped it into the reeds beside the flower. "Knots like that are the only sort worth trusting to a bog," she said.

That autumn Ruth took the cord and a pocketful of flat grey stones out onto the path. Where the ground softened she set a stone down, and where it hardened she set another a stride on, so that the stones made a dotted line that wandered between the alders. Halfway to the beeches the path swung left for no reason she could see, and then she saw the sinkhole, black water with a skin of leaves, lying straight where the old line would have carried her.

She left the last stone in her pocket and tied the cord to the gatepost, looping it twice so the knot would hold. When she looked back the dots ran all the way from the mill to the trees, crooked and sure, and the water beside the path had gone still and bright, holding a white flower up to the light.