Black outline tattoo of a lotus flower with dotted petal details on the ankle, shown against a blue background.

Lotus flower outline on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with layered, pointed petals is drawn in a single black outline, with small dots decorating some of the inner petals and the centre. The linework is even and the design is shown in close view on pale skin with a warm tone. The flower is centred in the frame, with the blue background visible on either side.

Botanical Dotwork Ankle Lotus Flower Petal Outline Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, before the kettle sulks. Where was I? Ah, the summer the sea came up Gull Lane and sat in Mrs Vosper's front parlour like an uninvited relation. Every lodger at number nine had an opinion about the damp, and Mr Quint had none. He was a quiet man with a cardigan the colour of wet slate, and he kept a jam jar of grey silt on his windowsill, which he fed a spoonful of rainwater each morning like a nursemaid.

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Nobody asked what he was growing until the thing broke the surface. A single green shoot, then a bud no bigger than a thimble, then, on the morning the tide finally went out, a flower. Pointed petals stacked one inside another, each outlined as neat as a stitched hem, and across the inner ones he had pricked tiny dots with a darning needle, he said, so the dew would have somewhere to sit. Mrs Vosper came in with her broom to scold him about the mud on the lino and stood there instead, holding the broom like a shepherd's crook.

He said the seed had come off a ship from somewhere hot and had lain in the bottom of a sea chest for forty years, waiting for a wet enough summer. Lotus seeds, he said, can sleep that long and still wake up. I asked him if the flower would last. He said it would close at dusk and open again at dawn, every day until the water went, and that was the whole trick of it.

He left on the Tuesday with his trunk and no jar. Mrs Vosper found it on the sill, the petals folded shut, the dots gone dull with dust. She kept it there for thirty years, and every morning she gave it a spoon of rainwater, though none of us ever saw it open again.