Blue pen sketch of a lotus flower with dotwork beads hanging beneath it, drawn as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower sketch with dotted chain

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A blue ink drawing of a layered lotus flower sits on white paper, with its petals shaded using fine hatched strokes. Below the bloom, strings of dots and small circles fall in loose curved lines, and a single small circle sits at the upper left. The composition is centred and vertical, with the sketch reading as a finished design rather than a photograph of skin.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Flower Dotted chain Dot Circle Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrowmere had seen the moat clear since the old lord's sons drowned their quarrel in it, so when Tamsin Crake came up the causeway with a bucket and a bad knee, the carters stopped to watch her. She was going to bail the ditch below the broken gatehouse, she said, because something was flowering down there and she wanted to see its colour.

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The ditch was black muck to the knee. She worked a whole morning with her skirts knotted up, and by noon the stagnant green had drawn back enough to show a single pale bloom standing on the water like a lamp. Its petals lay in layers, each one folded at the tip, and the water around it was threaded with strings of small seeds, the sort a rosary maker keeps in a dish. Beneath the flower the seeds hung from the mud in curved loops, and each loop ended in a drop of light.

The old women said the castle had been built on a bargain. The lord had promised the mere a daughter in return for dry walls, and the mere had taken her the way it takes everything, slowly, through the reeds. What it had never taken was the chain of prayer beads her mother had woven into her hair that morning, because they had caught on the iron gate and stayed there. Tamsin did not believe a word of it. She picked the flower anyway, and the seeds came up with it on a thread of green, and she carried them up the causeway in both hands without spilling one.

At the gatehouse she hung the chain on the iron hook where the girl's mother had once tied her own, and by evening the water in the ditch had risen a finger's width, as though it had been waiting for someone to ask.