Lotus flower with two dragonflies

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil-style drawing of a open lotus bloom with layered petals, with two dragonflies, one at upper left and one at upper right, with their wings and segmented bodies drawn in detail. The linework is dark and confident, with soft grey shading across the petals and wings, and small dots and specks scattered around the edges. The design is centred on a white background with a grey vignette border.

Botanical Lotus Dragonfly Flower Petal Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your collar up and sit nearer, the wind on Carrick Pass steals the good bits. You want to hear about the lotus? Then you should know the tarn beneath the pass is black and cold and grows nothing but rushes, so when a bloom opened on it one July, every carter on the road stepped off the track to look. Old Maud Trelawney swore she watched it open before dawn, petals lifting one at a time like a hand unfolding a letter.

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Two dragonflies came to it that same week. One was blue-grey and thin as a darning needle, the other broader, with dark smudges along the edges of his wings. They had been squabbling over the same flat stone on the far bank since spring, and each now claimed the flower for himself. The thin one dived first and settled on the highest petal. The broad one landed on the next, and the petal bent under his weight, so the pair of them hung there in the mist, wings going like clockwork, neither willing to be first to fly off.

Maud's grandson, a shepherd and no fool, climbed up to see for himself. He said the petals had shut tight against the quarrelling, and the flies had sulked until the thin one laughed. Nobody had heard a dragonfly laugh before. The broad one took it as an insult and flew off down the valley without looking back. The thin one stayed, and when the lotus finally opened it did so for her alone, each petal shaded grey at the edge the way the mist shades the hills. By the time the shepherd got back down the track the tarn had gone dark, and the bloom was the only light left on the pass.