Watercolour-style pink and purple lotus flowers with a hummingbird tattoo running down the ribs and side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus flowers and hummingbird on the ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A column of lotus flowers descends the side of the torso, with a hummingbird in flight among the upper blooms. The linework is soft and the shading blends pink, purple and green washes, giving a loose watercolour look. The composition follows the curve of the ribs, with the largest flower at the top and smaller blooms fading toward the hip.

Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Hummingbird Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ines Okafor had kept a pond on the balcony of Hollis House for eleven years, though the council had never once asked her to. Three concrete tubs, a bucket of rainwater, and the lotus seeds her late husband had carried back from a market in Peckham in his coat pocket. Every July the pink blooms opened one after another, and the lads from the stairwell stopped their football to look up at them.

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The hummingbird arrived on a Tuesday in the wrong season, its green throat flashing against the grey render of the eighth floor. Nobody on the estate had seen one before, and nobody could say how it had got in. Ines watched it hover over the top tub, tilting its head at the blooms as if checking them against a list. Then it dropped, quick as a thrown coin, and drank from the highest flower.

Her grandson Tobi, who was nine and believed in most things, wanted to paint it. He sat on the cold step with a jam jar of brushes and tried to get the wings right. 'It's not a bird, it's a blur,' he said. Ines told him to paint the blur then, and to keep the paper wet so the colours ran into each other, the way the petals did at dusk.

By the end of August the hummingbird had gone, the way it came, with no note. Tobi's painting hung on the fridge, pink and violet bleeding into green. Ines moved the biggest tub to the sunniest corner, and each morning she checked the water for the small bright shape that never came back, and found the sky in it instead.