Black and grey shaded lotus flower tattoo with an om symbol above it, on a person's stomach beside the navel.

Lotus flower with om symbol on the stomach

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded lotus flower sits on the stomach, with a stylised om symbol above its petals and curling ornamental swirls and droplet shapes on either side. The linework is bold and the petals are filled with soft grey gradients that fade toward the highlights of the skin. The tattoo is centred in the frame, with the navel visible to the right and a patterned fabric waistband along the bottom edge.

Botanical Other Lotus Om symbol Flower Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tram has gone, and the canal below the lock is holding the streetlamps like spilt marmalade. You sit on the cold iron railing with your shoes beside you and watch a single narrowboat settle against its mooring, its chimney cold, a radio murmuring somewhere inside about weather further north. Nobody is about. Good. You came here to be unwatched.

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Auntie Surjit taught you to breathe like this, long and low, the sound rising from the bottom of the chest until it becomes a hum you can feel in your teeth. She said the lotus grows out of the mud at the bottom of the pond and still opens clean at dawn, and that you could too, if you stopped waiting for the water to be clear first. You thought she was being soft. She was never soft about anything else.

A fox crosses the towpath, unhurried, and you find yourself counting its steps the way she counted your breaths. Down by the sluice a dark bundle has snagged on the grille: a mesh bag of soaked paper lanterns, the kind sold in Chinatown with the prices still on them. You fish out the least torn one with the boathook from the lock keeper's hut, which you were never supposed to touch, and set it on the surface.

It turns once, slowly, as if deciding. Then the paper softens, the candle inside finally catches, and the whole thing opens like a flower at the first grey of morning. You stand, put your shoes back on, and walk home without looking back at the water, because she always said the good part was the breath you let go of.