Black and orange lotus flower tattoo with a dotted line and small star motifs below it, on a woman's upper back.

Lotus flower with dotted trail on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower with a black outline and orange fill sits on the upper back, just below the nape. Beneath it, a fine dotted line hangs down with small ornaments including a circle and a star. The photograph is taken from behind, with the hair pinned up and the composition centred on the tattoo.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Flower Star Dot Ornament Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the boarding house by its noises before its rooms. The pipes knock at six, the gulls fight over the bins at seven, and Mrs Pargeter's kettle sings through the floorboards like it has a grievance. You take the attic room because it is the cheapest and because the window looks east, over the harbour wall, where the tide leaves a skin of mud that turns gold at dawn. Nobody else on Lantern Row bothers with the mud. You do, every morning, with a flask and a notebook you never write in.

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The lodger in the room below yours keeps a pond on her windowsill, a chipped enamel bowl with one lily in it, its pale cup opening a little more each day. She tells you the lily came from a stall in Whitby and has never once rotted. She says the trick is to keep the water still and the roots shallow, and to remember that a thing can be rooted in mud and still open towards the light. You think she is talking about the lily. By the second week you are no longer sure.

On the last night of the season the wind drops and the harbour goes flat as a plate. You find her on the back step with a box of star-shaped brass buttons and a spool of thread, stitching a dotted line of them down a length of ribbon. She does not look up. She hands you the end of the ribbon and says, hold it steady, and you do, and the bowl on the windowsill above you catches the last of the sun and the lily glows like a lamp that has decided to stay lit. Nothing is finished. The ribbon hangs between you, dotted and trembling, and the tide comes in over the mud without a sound.