Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with a curling stem on the upper back of a person with dark hair, shown from behind.

Lotus flower on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with layered, shaded petals sits above a long stem that ends in a curling, wispy line. The linework is dark and fine, with soft grey shading inside the petals and a few small tonal variations along the stem. The tattoo is centred on the upper back against warm, softly lit skin, with the back of the head and hair visible at the top of the frame.

Botanical Fine line Back Lotus Flower Stem Swirl Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on the market at Harrowgate Cross since Lent, and the stallholders had stopped complaining about it. Mattie Greaves sold eels and pond weed from a trestle near the water tower. One morning a stranger in a grey coat set a cracked clay pot down beside her scales and asked the price of a lily.

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She told him there were no lilies in the town, only the drain pond behind the tannery. He said he would take one anyway, and he would pay with the thing a lily needs most, which was a stem's length of patience. He drew from his coat a single bloom folded tight like a fist, its petals dark at the edges as though the rain had got into them. It opened on the scale in the wet, one layer at a time, and she counted the layers because her mother had taught her to count what she could not afford.

With every petal it opened, the stem below curled down through the cobbles and into the drain, and each evening the drain ran a little clearer. The tannery men grumbled. The bread woman swore the rain had gone soft. Mattie kept her price, and the stranger came back every Thursday to pay with one more hour of waiting, until the whole market smelled of cut green.

On the last Thursday the rain stopped for the first time in a year. The stranger was gone, the clay pot was empty, and the stem had run out under the town and up through the grate into the light, where it had dried to a line of black on the stones. Mattie still sells eels. When customers ask about the wet, she tells them a lily is only a patient thing that learned to float, and she sends them home with a stem if they can wait for it.