Pencil outline sketch of a lotus flower with layered petals on plain paper, a botanical tattoo design.

Lotus flower pencil design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A single lotus flower is drawn in clean pencil outline, with layered pointed petals rising from a wide base. The lines are dark and even, with a few faint interior strokes marking the petal folds on the central petals. The drawing sits centred on a pale grey sheet with a handwritten "4." in the top left corner.

Botanical Lotus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boatwright's daughter had been told the lily would not open in salt water, so when the Hesper Gull left Port Calder she packed a seed pod from her grandmother's pond between two folded shirts and told nobody. Nine weeks out, the cook found her at the rail at dawn, turning the pod in her fingers. He said a thing that would not grow on a ship was a fool's cargo, and she said she had not asked him for an opinion on cargo.

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The weather turned off the Horn. For three days the hold took water and the crew took turns at the pumps, and the girl carried her jar of wet earth up and down the companionway so the pod would not dry. On the fourth night a wave came over the bow and the jar went skidding toward the scuppers. She caught it with her knees. When she lifted the cloth, a pale green shoot had pushed through the mud, no thicker than a thread, and it was still there when the sea settled.

They made the Cape with the shoot a hand high in a tin bucket lashed to the mast step. Nobody on board believed it would flower. But one morning in the grey light she woke to find the cook kneeling beside the bucket, his cap in his hands, and the bloom was there, five layers of pointed petals rising from the wide green cup, still closed at the heart.

She would not let him touch it. She said it needed to open when the sun was on the water, and so they waited, all of them, watching the salt sparkle in the swell until the first warm light reached the petals and they parted, one layer at a time.