Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with dotwork shading and outlined petals, placed on the forearm.

Lotus flower on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower in full bloom, with outlined petals layered from a central bud outwards. The petals are filled with stippled dotwork shading that darkens towards the edges and the base, leaving pale skin highlights in the centre. Faint reddish tones appear in a few petals against the plain skin of the forearm, which fills most of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Petal Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus was my grandmother's idea, and Nan had never let an idea go unargued. She wanted one white bloom on the top table at the wedding in the function room above the chip shop, and she wanted it grown in her own washing-up bowl, where she had kept the thing alive through three summers and one very bad winter. I said lotus flowers did not open in November. She said I had never met a lotus, which was true, because I had only ever met Nan.

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By Friday the bud was still shut tight as a fist. I carried the bowl up the stairs each night and set it on the radiator, then carried it back down to the cold kitchen, and Nan watched me from her armchair with the look she kept for short change at the paper shop. On Saturday morning I came in early to set up the room. The bowl sat where I had left it, the water gone the colour of weak tea, and the bud had split along one seam. Not open. Only thinking about it.

The guests arrived in damp coats, and the room smelt of fryer oil and wet umbrellas. I stood at the back with my hands in my pockets while the vicar's cousin read something about constancy. Somewhere between the vows and the first dance, the heat from the kitchen ovens came up through the floorboards. Nobody noticed except me. The petals went out one layer at a time, the outer ones dark along their edges where the bruising had been, the inner ones pale, creased and lit from beneath. The bride saw it first and made a small sound. Nan didn't look up from her tea. She only said, 'Told you,' and reached for another biscuit.