Pencil drawing of a lotus flower with flames or smoke curling above it, surrounded by scrolls and smaller lotus blooms, shown as a tattoo design on a cardboard background.

Lotus flower with smoke swirls design

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a large central lotus bloom with smaller lotus flowers at the sides and bottom, framed by curling scroll and cloud-like shapes. Smoke or flame wisps rise from the central flower. The linework is fine and the shading uses soft greys and brown tones, with the design centred on a textured cardboard background.

Japanese Botanical Lotus Flower Smoke Swirl Scroll Leaves Petal Water droplet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

In the drowned moat of Harrowgate Keep, where the curtain wall had slumped into the reeds, a lotus came up each summer that nobody had planted. Old Maud, who cut rushes for the thatchers, said it was the last lord of the castle, who died owing money to half the county and asked in his will to be laid in the water. Her grandson Tam laughed at that and poled his punt out to see for himself.

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One dry August the mere shrank back from its banks and the flower stood alone on a bed of cracked mud, smoke curling from its heart. Tam crouched beside it and found a rush wick sunk deep among the petals, black at the tip and still smouldering like a snuffed candle. The smoke rose in loops and split into shapes he knew from the carved scrolls above the gatehouse. He had his knife out to pull the roots and sell them to the apothecary at Dunmere, where lotus fetched a good price.

He didn't cut it. He sat in the punt until the light went orange, then paddled home and came back at dusk with a stub of tallow and a jar lid. He set the light on the water at the flower's foot, and the smoke leaned towards it as though it had been waiting. Every evening that autumn he came back with a fresh light, and the rain, when it finally fell, filled the moat to its old line.

The cattle at Harrowgate drank clean all that winter. In spring the thatchers came for their rushes and found Tam's punt drawn up under the gatehouse with the knife still tied to its thwart, and the lotus opening white in the middle of the mere, a thread of smoke standing straight up in the still air.