Woman seen from behind by a pool with a black and grey lotus mandala tattoo at the nape of the neck, an anchor tattoo on her upper back, and a red-toned floral outline on her raised upper arm.

Lotus mandala and anchor on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A woman with her back to the camera and her hair pulled up shows several tattoos at a swimming pool. The main piece is a black and grey lotus mandala at the base of the neck, drawn with fine lines and detailed inner patterns. An anchor tattoo sits on the upper back near the shoulder blade, and a red-toned floral outline is visible on her raised upper arm.

Botanical Back Upper arm Lotus Mandala Anchor Floral Rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide tables had to be finished before the ferry could leave, and Ada Penrose had got as far as the thirteenth week of the spring series when the dividers slipped and left a blot the size of a farthing on the ruled paper. She sat with the nib lifted and looked at it for a long time. Outside, the harbour master was shouting at a boy about a mooring line, and the gulls were working the bins behind the chandlery.

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Her father had taught her the sums in this same back room, the moon's pull set against the shoals, and he had never let a figure stand that he could not draw out in full. He used to say the sea repeats itself the way a good pattern does, petal inside petal, and that a navigator who could not see the repeat would always be surprised. She had thought him fanciful. At nineteen she had covered the margins of his almanacs with rings of little petals until he took the pencil off her.

The blot sat over the week the ferry Marigold was due to run the Skerry Gap at the top of the flood. On the old chart the gap was marked with a small anchor, and beside it her father had scratched a lotus, eight petals open, in faint pencil. She had always taken it for decoration. Now she walked the dividers out from the anchor, counting petals as she went, and found that the eighth fell exactly on the reef the old men called the Widow's Knuckle.

She drew a line through the Marigold's sailing, wrote a new hour in the margin in her father's hand and, because the page was spoiled anyway, pressed the nib into the blot and began to draw the petals outward, one ring at a time. When the harbour master came in at noon, shaking rain from his cap, she did not look up. The ferry stayed at her moorings, and the flood ran over the Knuckle as if it had been waiting for someone to ask.