Black line drawing of a lotus flower in botanical style with dotwork shading and dot accents, shown as a tattoo design on a pale background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower design with dotwork shading

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower drawn in black outline, with layered petals, inner curved lines and small teardrop and leaf-like motifs inside the petals. Soft stippled dotwork shading sits at the base of the petals and around the outer edges, with scattered dots around the flower. The design is shown in black ink on a pale background, with faint red guide lines running vertically through the centre.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Flower Petal Leaves Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sluice at Hobb's Dyke has not run clean since the spring of 1953, so when the water went still that July I knew the lotus would come up in the old settling pond. My father had planted the roots in a biscuit tin the year before the flood, and he swore they would not take in English mud. He was wrong about that, as he was wrong about most things he said with his hat on.

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He had a plumb line strung across the pond from the pump house to the willow, and every evening he sat on the coping with a pencil and marked the petals on a card. Eight outer, five inner, one bud standing up like a candle at the middle. He said a flower should be drawn the way a levee is built, from the centre outwards, so the water knows where to stop. I thought that was nonsense until the dots began to appear.

The stipple came first, a fine grey dust at the foot of each petal, where the silt had settled thickest. Then came the seeds, small black beads falling from the bud down the line, and I counted them into the tin as my father once counted sluice gates. By August the pond was speckled like the margin of his ledgers, and every petal had a teardrop inside it where a sparrow had landed.

When the bloom opened on the morning of the twentieth, the plumb line caught the sun and the whole flower stood perfectly even, as if it had been ruled onto the water. I took the last seed from the tin, rolled it between finger and thumb, and dropped it into the outflow. It went down past the gate and into the dark, which is where we had always sent the things we could not keep.