Black line drawing of a lotus flower with curling swirls and tendrils, shown as a botanical tattoo design on a white background.

Lotus flower with swirling scrolls

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised lotus flower in solid black sits at the upper centre of the image, with pointed petals and a curved stem. Long, tapering scroll lines extend to the left and right, ending in tight spirals. The design is rendered in bold black shapes on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Botanical Lotus Flower Swirl Scroll Tendril Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus opened on the fourteenth night out of Calcutta, and Cook woke the whole watch to see it. He had carried the pot up from the galley in both hands, the way a man carries a sleeping child, and set it on the hatch cover where the lantern could reach it. Nobody had told us a flower could live in a tin bucket of brackish water for three months. Cook said it only needed to be left alone and kept in the sun.

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We had been becalmed since the Cape. The sails hung like wet washing, and when a breath of wind did come, it curled off the swell in long hooked ribbons that unspooled across the flat sea and rolled up again at the horizon. Cook called them the ship's own handwriting. Young Tobias said they were the sea trying to remember its name. I said nothing. I was thinking about how the bloom had come up through the mud of a tank in a city I would never see, and how many hands had carried it since, so that it could open here, in the middle of nowhere, for six of us in our stockinged feet.

Two days later the wind came back hard and stripped the petals off the hatch in one go, scattering them across the deck like spent banknotes. Cook got down on his knees and gathered every one he could reach. He pressed them flat between the pages of the ship's log, under the entry for the day we left Calcutta, and wrote beside them only the date we crossed the Line.

When I open that log now, the lotus is still there, dry as parchment, its edges curling out toward the margins as though they still caught a wind.