Black line tattoo of a lotus flower with waves and clouds in a Japanese style across a person's stomach above white underwear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus and waves across the abdomen

Japanese · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large lotus flower sits at the centre of the design, with its petals drawn in solid black outline and the navel showing within it. Clouds, wave curls, water droplets and radiating striped lines fill the area around it and extend towards the hips. The work is black ink only, with bold uniform linework and no shading, and the image is framed from the chest to the upper thighs.

Japanese Botanical Other Lotus Wave Cloud Water droplet Ray Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming sideways off the river since before the fish stalls opened, and by eight you have stopped pretending the awning will hold. Your uncle Teodor sells ink-stained woodblock prints under a sheet of tarpaulin, and he has been muttering about the water pooling in its folds all morning. You help him drag the crates under the arch of the bridge, where the bricks drip but the wind cannot reach.

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Under there you find the print he never sells. It is a lotus, its petals drawn in heavy black outline, sitting on a sheet of hand-cut waves that curl like hair and throw up clouds at the edges. Rays fan out behind it in stripes, and droplets hang from the corners as though someone has shaken the paper. Teodor says a man from Osaka paid him for it in 1974 and never came back to collect it, and that he has kept it dry ever since out of spite.

Water keeps pooling. A gull lands on the tarpaulin and sheds a feather onto a crate of onions. Customers pass in their hoods, not one of them glancing at the prints, and you start to feel foolish for thinking the picture belongs to anyone at all. Then a girl about your age stops with a bag of shopping, looks at the lotus and says the petals seem to be opening in the damp. Teodor goes quiet. He wraps the print in oilcloth and hands it to her without asking for a price.