Black outline drawing of a lotus flower with leaves and spiral swirls, a botanical tattoo design on a plain white background.

Lotus flower with swirls line design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a lotus flower with a layered bloom at the centre, pointed petals and leaves spreading to either side. Several spiral scrolls sit around the base and edges of the flower. The linework is uniform and unshaded, on a plain white background, so it reads as a stencil or flash sheet design.

Botanical Lotus Flower Leaf Swirl Scroll Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, the wind off the moat has teeth tonight. No, not that stone, the one with the crack. It's been sitting there since my grandmother's grandmother told the same tale to her own children. Now, the old keep at Harrowmere had a moat, and the moat went dry the summer the tanners cut the sluice. In the bottom of it, where the mud was blackest, a lotus came up through the cracked clay as if it had been told the ground was a pond and hadn't believed a word of it.

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Lady Isolde Pennock kept three cooks and a goat called Parliament, and every morning she climbed down into that dry moat with a bucket of rainwater for the flower. The swirls, mark you, were the wind and the water arguing over who owned the place. Dust rose off the bailey stones in curls and wrapped itself round the petals, and the broad leaves lay flat on the mud like the palms of men who had given up asking for pardon.

Then the railway men came with their measuring chains and their foreman, Tobias Greave, who wanted the keep down by Michaelmas. He saw the lotus and laughed and said he'd have it out by dinner. He put his spade to the root, and the bloom folded shut like a fist. That night every stone he had lifted tumbled back into its place on the wall, and in the morning his tally book was blank except for one line in his own hand: the price he had quoted the company was a lie.

He walked back to the moat with the book under his arm. When he got down to the flower it was open again, wide as a cupped hand, and the leaves had turned to face the road. Parliament, I'm told, ate the book. But the wall still stands, and so does the lotus, and if you go down there on a dry morning you'll see the cracked clay has been watered by someone who never gave their name.