Fine line outline of a lotus flower tattooed on the inner forearm, near the wrist.

Lotus flower on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single lotus flower is drawn in a thin, unshaded outline on the inner forearm of a person whose hand is raised. The petals, stamen and pointed lower petal are rendered with delicate, even linework and no fill. The ink is a single dark tone on pale skin, and the flower sits just above the wrist against a dark background.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Outline Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The radiator gave up forty miles short of Calder Wells, so Ruth walked the rest of the way with the water bottles knocking against her hip. By noon the road had dissolved into a grey shimmer, and the only landmark left was a dead mesquite with a strip of red rag knotted to one branch. Past it lay the dry pan, cracked into plates the size of tabletops, and in the middle of the nearest plate sat a single seedpod, curled shut like a fist and the colour of old paper.

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Her grandfather had been a surveyor for the county, and he had told her that the pan flooded once in forty years and that lotus seed could wait in cracked mud for longer than anyone alive would remember. He used to fill the margins of his field books with flowers drawn in one unbroken line, pen never lifting, so that you could follow the petals around and never find the place where he had started. Ruth crouched by the pod and traced the same kind of line in the dust with a fingernail, round the base of the bloom, up over the curl of a petal, down to the point where the stem should have been.

A lorry came grinding up from the south around three o'clock and slowed beside her. The driver leaned out, looked at the drawing and then at her, and asked if she needed a lift to the wells. She shook her head and held up the last bottle, half full. He shrugged, said there was rain forecast for Thursday, and drove on, leaving a long plume of dust that settled slowly over her outline.

She waited until the dust had settled. Then she added one more petal at the top, left open at the tip, because a closed shape had never let anything in, and walked on toward the wells with the sun on the back of her neck.