Black ink pen drawing of an open lotus flower with hatched shading on the petals, shown as a design on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower pen drawing

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A lotus flower with layered petals opens outwards from a central bud, with stamens visible at the centre. The petals are outlined in dark, confident linework and shaded with fine cross-hatching that gives them volume. The design is drawn in black ink on a plain white background, with the flower centred and its outer petals spreading to both sides.

Botanical Lotus Flower Petal Bud Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ferryman's daughter, Ysolt, was the only one in Carrow Reach who could still row against the spring flood. Her father had lost two fingers to the winter ice and the bargemen said the river had taken its due. So when the grey barge came nosing up from the mill towns with its cargo of salt and no crew, it was Ysolt who threw the rope.

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The bargeman was called Tamsin Holt, and she had a box in the hold wrapped in oilcloth. She would not open it at the landing. She only asked that it be carried to the reed beds below the weir, where the water went still and green. Ysolt rowed her there in the dusk, the oars knocking softly in their rowlocks, and Tamsin lifted the box onto her knees and undid the cloth one turn at a time.

Inside was a lotus bud the size of a fist, carved from pale wood and painted so finely that its petals looked wet. Tamsin set it on the water. For a long moment nothing happened. Then the petals began to open outwards, one after another, the outer ones flaring wide to the banks on either side, and at the heart of the flower a cluster of gold stamens caught what light was left.

Ysolt did not ask what it was for. Tamsin only said that her mother had made it, and her mother's mother before, and that the river had a memory for things that were given back to it. When they rowed home the reeds were black and the flower glowed faintly among them, and the flood, for the first time in forty springs, stayed inside its banks.