Black and grey fine line lotus with curling vines and a small flower, tattooed across the top of a bare foot.

Lotus and vines on the top of a foot

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on a grey surface, showing a black ink lotus flower with layered, mandala-like petals and scrolling vines. The vines extend up towards the ankle on one side and across towards the toes on the other. The linework is fine and even, with the petals filled with small dotted and curved detail, and the tattoo is shown in sharp focus against the neutral background.

Botanical Fine line Other Lotus Flower Vine Scroll Foot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The officer at the Sarnet crossing turned my passport over twice, as if the thing he was looking for might be tucked behind the photograph. Under the strip light I had the stencil book open on my knee, forty pages of lotus flowers my grandmother drew at her kitchen table, each petal folded inward on itself, layer after layer, with a single dot of ink at every tip.

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"Contraband?" he asked, tapping the cover.

"Patterns," I said. "For tattooing. Nobody's needle has touched them yet." That was true in a way. My grandmother never let anyone copy a design without first walking it from one end to the other with a finger, the way you would trace a road on a map. The vines were always the route. One came up from the ankle, another ran out along the toes, and wherever they met the flower they turned back on themselves, so you could never tell which way you had come.

He lifted a page and held it to the light. For a moment he was not an officer at all, only a man with a daughter who had asked him for something pretty and had been given a rubber stamp instead. He pressed his thumb to a petal, then to the vine that ran beside it, and asked if the lotus had a name.

"Not in our family," I said. "Only the way home."

He stamped the page with a hard, purple thump, and the ink bled a little into the petal's tip, which was exactly where my grandmother would have wanted it. He handed the book back and I closed it on the mark, feeling the new petal open against the old ones, on my side of the line.