Black and grey lotus flower outline with grey shading on a forearm, shown in three close-up views against darkly coloured skin.

Lotus flower on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three close-up photographs show a forearm with a symmetrical lotus flower drawn in bold black outline, with its petals filled in soft grey. The surrounding skin is covered in a dense dark wash with a jagged edge, and the design is centred across the top of the forearm in each view. Lighting is even and the background is a plain grey wall.

Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Petal Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Senet had been grinding soot on the same flat stone since before the Nile ran low, and Ahmose had never once been allowed to touch the lead-white. "Black first," she said, pressing the grinding stone into his palm until his fingers ached. "Black is the water. You do not paint a flower on dry ground."

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They worked that spring on the lid of a cedar coffin for a cloth merchant's wife in Thebes. Ahmose traced the lotus with a reed dipped in ink, eight petals, then sixteen, then the small crown at the centre where the seeds sat like beads in a dish. Each petal he filled with grey, thinned with water until the wood showed through, the colour of the river just before dawn. Around the edges he laid the black in a ragged line, letting the flat brush skip, because Senet said the night should never be neat.

When the merchant's wife came to inspect the work, she ran her thumb along the outline and frowned at a smudge of red near the heart of the bloom. Senet had put it there on purpose, a dab of ochre from her fingertip, where the flower opens. Ahmose began to stammer an apology. Senet only said the lotus had come up out of the mud, and some of the mud had stayed on it.

The wife paid in copper and had the coffin carried home on a cart. Ahmose kept the reed. For days afterwards he found grey pigment under his nails, however hard he scrubbed, and he decided the stone had been right about the water.