Before and after side-by-side of a botanical lotus cover-up tattoo on a forearm, with the faded grey original on the left and a purple and blue version on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus cover-up on a forearm, before and after

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows an older, faded tattoo of a lotus flower with swirling water lines in grey and dark outline. The right panel shows the same lotus redrawn as a cover-up in purple, with blue and pink shading in the surrounding water lines. The composition is a close, straight-on view of the forearm against a black background.

Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Water Swirl Before and after

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus had been on the sea wall at Saltmarrow for longer than anyone could say, a grey bloom painted on the lime render above the chandler's yard, so faded by salt that Ada Trewin only noticed it when she went up the ladder to hang the lanterns. She stood on the top rung and told the boy holding the foot of it that the flower had once been beautiful, which was a lie, because she had painted it herself the summer her husband sailed for the Grand Banks and never came home.

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The gale in February took half the wall into the harbour. When the masons arrived with their buckets of lime and said the whole face had to be rendered flat, Ada refused. She walked to the apothecary on Quay Street and bought a tin of violet pigment, the sort the net-menders used to dye their twine, and mixed it with linseed oil and rainwater she had kept in a bucket since the storm, because she wanted the colour to remember where it had come from.

She drew the petals first, wide and layered, then the ripples around them. When the blue went in she let it bleed into rose where the evening sun struck the stone. In places the old grey outline showed through the new paint, a ghost stem and a dark knot of water, and she left those alone. The boy asked why she didn't cover them. She said a thing that has been under the sea can still be used for its lines.

At dusk the lanterns came on along the quay, and the wet paint took their light and held it, so the lotus seemed to float on water that was not there at all. Ada climbed down one rung at a time, a hand on the cold iron, and stood looking up until the tide turned and the harbour bell began to ring.