Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with shaded leaves and a dotted vine on a forearm.

Lotus and vine on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised lotus flower with solid black petals and a curled centre sits on the forearm, with shaded grey leaves and a fine dotted line trailing along a vine. The linework is clean and the leaves are softened with grey shading, while the petals are filled solid black. The photograph is taken indoors against a plain background, with the arm resting on a soft surface.

Botanical Blackwork Forearm Lotus Flower Leaves Vine Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus came up through a crack in the bin yard at Wexford House in the second week of June, the same week the lift on the ninth floor gave up for good. Nobody had planted it. Mrs Ogunleye from flat 41 swore it had come in with the bag of compost her son dumped by the bins, and Mr Pryce from the ground floor said it was a pigeon's doing, and the arguments ran through the stairwell for a fortnight while the leaves unfurled, grey-green and furred like something left out in the rain.

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Ruth from the housing office came with a clipboard and a letter that said the yard was to be cleared by Friday. She stood over the plant with her pen against her teeth. The petals were black as wet slate, folded in on themselves, and the centre had curled into a tight spiral, as if it were listening for something underground. She had been sent to sign off the clearance. She wrote Monday instead.

Every evening after that, residents came down with cups of washing-up water and tipped them along a thin dotted trail of runners that someone, years ago, had scratched into the concrete with a nail. The vine followed the line. By August it had reached the foot of the stairs, then the first step, then the doors of the lift that still hadn't been fixed, and nobody on the ninth floor complained about the stairs any more.

On the last morning of the month the council van came, and the men found the yard already wet, the leaves glossy, the whole bin area smelling faintly of rain. They left the pot by the bins with a note tucked under its rim. On the back of her clearance letter, Ruth had written: Leave it. Somebody will want to see it bloom.