Black and grey lotus flower tattoos stacked down the spine on a bare back, linked by dotted lines.

Lotus flowers down the spine

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A bare back shows five lotus flower tattoos stacked vertically along the spine, each smaller than the one above it. The largest lotus at the top has detailed, dotted petals and short dotted rays, while the lower flowers are simpler and joined by a fine dotted line. The image is in black and white, with the ink shown in solid black and greys against smooth skin.

Dotwork Botanical Back Lotus Spine Dot Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lodge keeper tells you not to use the east stair at Hollin Keep. The treads are rotten, the mortar has given up, and the Lady who died in the solar still walks there on wet evenings. You have a surveyor's commission, a plumb line in your coat pocket and a day rate that does not care about ghosts, so you take the stair anyway. Wind comes through the arrow slits like cold water through a sluice, and every step gives a small complaint under your boot.

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Halfway up, the stair turns, and there in the sill of a narrow window is a lotus cut into the stone. Its petals are dotted with hundreds of tiny pocks, the patient work of someone who had time or nothing else to do. Below it, a fine line of dots runs down the wall. You follow it with your fingertips. Each landing has another flower, smaller than the last, stacked down the masonry like a row of lamps, until the final one sits low by the undercroft door, no bigger than your thumbnail.

Your notebook says the keep is sound apart from the east stair. You open it on your knee and try to write that the carvings postdate the walls, but the pencil keeps drifting toward the dotted line. Your plumb line hangs straight from the window sill and touches the bud exactly. Whoever cut these knew the tower's true height. They marked the drop of each storey where the floors had once been, a flower for every room that fell into the dark.

You put the plumb line away, close the notebook and write one line on its cover: the keep is taller than the survey says. Then you climb back up, touching each flower on the way, counting them aloud so the wind has something to hear.