Hand-drawn lotus flower in purple and teal ink linework over a watercolour wash, with the words Be enlightened beneath it, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Lotus flower with Be enlightened text

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A lotus flower is drawn with bold black outlines and fine hatched lines in purple, pink and teal, with its petals layered open. The words Be enlightened sit in a simple serif font below the flower. The flower is set against a loose, splattered watercolour background in teal, peach and muted pink.

Botanical Lotus Flower Quote Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ink ran out somewhere past Aden, so Hamish Dunne mixed the last of it with weak tea and tried again. The lotus head he was copying sat on the chart table beside the inkwell, its seed pods gone brown and hard as walnuts, pressed flat between two sheets of the ship's blotting paper. A laundry boy in Bombay had given it to him for a shilling and a promise not to tell the bosun.

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Every evening the Corinthia rolled a little further south, and every evening he drew the petals outward from a centre he could not quite find. The lines wanted to be straight. He kept giving them the curve of the bow wave, the way the spray lifted and fell back on itself, until the flower looked less like something rooted in mud and more like something that had been thrown up and had decided to stay.

Off Port Said a stoker named Lowe leaned over his shoulder and asked who the drawing was for. Hamish said his sister in Leith, who had never once asked him for anything. Lowe studied the purple hatching and said it looked like a bruise that had learned manners. Hamish laughed, then went quiet, because the flower had come out with fewer lines than he intended and he liked it better that way.

At Southampton the customs men unrolled everything he owned and found nothing to declare except the drawing, which they held up to the lamp for a long time. The teal wash had bled into the peach at the edges where the salt air had crept under the paper. Hamish took it back, folded it once, and wrote beneath the petals the two words he had been carrying since Bombay, in the small square hand the purser had taught him.