Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with detailed linework on a woman's ribs, under a hand resting on her chest.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flower tattoo on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A detailed lotus flower with layered petals and a pointed base is tattooed in black ink on the side of the torso, just below the breast. The linework is fine and precise, with light shading inside the petals and simple outlines on the outer leaves. The subject is shown in a close crop, with a grey knit sweater and gold rings visible above the design.

Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Petal Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the canvas has ears and the lamps are guttering. Gather round while I tell you about the Pell and Sons Travelling Marvels, which in the year of the great flood had one tent left and a pond the size of a cartwheel. Ma Dovey ran the water act. She could fold herself into the lotus, legs crossed over, palms turned up, and sit on the surface of that black pond without a single ripple.

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The trouble was the pond. Each town they played had less coal for the boiler, so the water went cold and then skinned over with ice. Dovey sat on it anyway. Her husband Tobias, who kept the books, counted the coins in a biscuit tin every night and said they would be lucky to eat by Michaelmas. She told him the lily had grown out of mud every morning of its life and would not start complaining now.

On the last night at Hexworth Fair the rain came sideways and the crowd was three children and a dog. Dovey climbed into her pose. Petal by petal she unfolded, the way a lily opens at dawn, and the lamps caught the wet on her shoulders. The children stopped chewing their toffee. The dog sat down. Nobody paid, and she did not ask them to.

When she finally stood, the pond was still as a plate. Tobias swears the water had drawn a flower of its own in the silt on the surface, black petals layered one over another. The tent came down the next morning, but the pond is still in the field at Hexworth, and if you stand at its edge at first light you will see the lilies opening one by one, as though someone is still sitting very patiently inside them.