Black ornate lotus mandala tattoo with blue and purple watercolour wash and dangling drops on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus mandala with watercolour wash on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a symmetrical lotus flower with layered petals and a central ornate motif, outlined in black and filled with fine dotted and hatched shading. Beneath it, a fine chain of dots and small pendant shapes hangs down. Soft blue, violet and pink watercolour washes sit behind the lotus, contrasting with the black linework, and the design is centred on the outer thigh.

Botanical Dotwork Thigh Lotus Mandala Flower Drop Chain Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, you're letting the cold in. The train to Harrowgate won't come for another forty minutes, so you'll have time for this one, and it's true enough if you don't ask me which bits I've tidied.

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There was a stationmaster at Coldwell Junction called Mr Ambrose Tiller, who kept a lotus in a tin bath behind the signal box. Nobody knew where he got the seed. He said a driver brought it up from the canal in his cap, and he planted it out of spite, because the flowers on the embankment had all been trampled by the excursion crowds. The bath sat under the drip from the guttering, and every wet night the rain came off the roof in a line of beads, and the old man would stand beneath it and count the drops on his fingers.

Then the bath cracked in the frost of '63, and the lotus had to be moved to the reservoir in the valley, where the water was clean and wide and blue as a pair of ink wells. It bloomed there with petals like a chapel roof, layered and tight, and the gangers came down on their dinner hour to look at it. Tiller would not let them touch it. He said a flower that grows out of mud has earned its own quiet.

When the line was electrified and the reservoir drained for the new pipework, the lotus was left high on the mudflats, and everyone assumed it had gone. But the next spring it came up through the cracked clay, and it had hung a fine chain of seed pods beneath each bloom, like the drops off a station awning, each one catching the light. Tiller was long dead by then. The porter tied a tin cup to the bottom of the chain for the birds. Fair enough, isn't it, that a thing should keep a little rain for itself?