Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with dotwork stippling and soft shading on a person's upper arm near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey lotus or lily flower sits on the upper arm, with its petals drawn in fine lines and soft brushed shading. Stippled dots add texture around the centre and along the petal edges. The photograph is cropped close to the shoulder against a dark top and a blurred brown background.

Dotwork Botanical Upper arm Lotus Flower Petal Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By March the ice on Hollin Mere had gone grey and rotten at the edges, and Mr Pardoe still wanted the sketches finished before the bank holiday. You sat on the lock gate with his ink pot between your knees and tried to draw the water lily the way it actually opened, not the way the seed catalogues showed it. Every morning the bud split a little further, shedding its dark wet sheath, and every morning you arrived too late to see the moment it happened.

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Your father called the mere a poor man's sea and would not let you go near it. He said the bottom was full of old prams and a horse nobody had come back for. Mr Pardoe only laughed at that. He paid you a shilling a sheet, and he liked the lines to be fine, the petals layered like pages of a letter folded over and over. When you showed him the first drawing he tilted it toward the window and said it was handsome but dry, as if the flower had been left out in the sun too long.

So you took the nib to the paper and dabbed it, again and again, along the petal edges where the water had beaded on the lily that morning. You pressed dots around the centre like seeds falling out of a pod. It took the whole afternoon. When the light went the colour of weak tea you held the sheet at arm's length and saw that the flower had stopped looking like a picture of a flower and begun to look like one that might close for the night.

Mr Pardoe came down the towpath at dusk, looked at the paper for a long time, and said nothing. Then he handed you the shilling and two more, and you walked home past the mere, where the real lilies were already folding themselves shut against the cold.