Back of a woman with a black linework Japanese-style lotus and wave design across her lower back, and a peony and flower sleeve on her arm, photographed in a dim studio.

Lotus back piece and flower arm sleeve

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind, her head cropped out of frame, with a large black linework design covering her lower back. A central lotus flower sits above a fan of scrolling petals and wave-like forms, and a sleeve of peonies, scrolls and patterned fills runs down her arm. The ink is black on skin with no colour, and the dim, warm-toned room sits behind her.

Japanese Botanical Back Upper arm Forearm Lotus Peony Flower Wave Scroll Back piece Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ice on the lower pond has gone grey at the edges, and you break it with the heel of your boot before you lower the tin into the cold water. Inside are the seeds your grandmother gathered the autumn before she stopped going down the field, hard as river stones and wrapped in a page torn from the feed merchant's almanac. She told you they could sleep for years if the mud stayed wet, and that a seed only wakes when someone has stopped checking on it.

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So you stop checking. Through January you carry buckets to the ewes and count the bales in the lean-to, and the peonies you planted by the cold frame lose their leaves and become sticks. Your uncle asks why you bother with a pond full of muck when the north field needs draining. You say nothing and go back to the trough, where the water has a skin of dark ice that cracks when the wind comes off the ridge. Each evening the light drops earlier behind the barn, and the tin sits on the bottom step like a question nobody has answered.

In March the thaw comes all at once, brown water running off the yard and into the ditches. You are cleaning out the trough with a bent spade when something green breaks the surface, then a curled leaf, then a bud the colour of watered milk. You kneel on the wet boards and do not reach for it yet. You just watch the water settle around the first flower, as if it had been waiting for you to look away.