Pencil-shaded lotus with a long stem, beside two black ink lotus designs with swirling lines, drawn on pale paper.

Lotus flower designs on paper

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three lotus flower designs: a pencil drawing with soft shading and a long curved stem, and two solid black ink versions with stylised, cut-out looking petals. Two of the black designs have decorative curling tendrils, and the lower design has a scrolled stem. The pencil drawing uses grey tones and the black ink designs are high contrast on a plain pale background.

Botanical Lotus Flower Stem Swirl Tendril Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the mere before the mist lifts off the reeds, just as your grandmother said you would if you kept your boots off the stile and your mouth shut. Beyond the last cottage at Hollin Edge the beech wood gives way to a pond nobody in the village owns, black as ink and rimmed with sedge. The lotus grows out in the middle, where the water is deepest. Nobody planted it. Old Mrs Tarrant says it came up through the silt the year the chapel roof fell in, and that anyone who tries to pull one will find the stem goes down further than the church spire is tall.

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You have brought a sheet of cartridge paper and a pencil stub in your coat, because Tom Ashby at the forge offered a shilling for a true picture of it, and because you have never drawn anything that stayed still for you. You sit on an oak root and try to get the petals right. They are not like rose petals. They curl at the tips and hold the light on their undersides. You rub the grey in with your thumb until the paper goes soft. When you look up the flower has opened another ring, and a dragonfly is resting on the seed head as though it had been asked to pose.

Back in the village Tom holds the drawing to the window and says the stem stands too straight, that a lotus leans toward whoever is watching it. So you take the ink pot and go out again in the rain. On a fresh sheet you paint the flower solid black, petals cut hard against the paper, with tendrils curling off the stem like the ferns that grow over the chapel wall.

At dusk you weight the ink drawing with a stone on the water's edge and walk home without looking back. In the morning the stone is still there and the paper is gone. The reeds around it are bent into a neat curl, as though something had read the picture and wanted the stem to lean.