Close-up of a woman's torso showing a small black fine line lotus flower tattoo on the side of the ribs, above a light blue skirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus outline tattoo on the side ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a torso cropped below the neck and above the hips, with a light blue suede-look skirt and a black crop top. A small lotus flower sits on the side of the ribcage, drawn in thin black outline with no shading. The image is in colour, with the tattoo as the only ink, and the subject is centred against a bed with a white fur throw.

Fine line Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men at the Shallows colliery had a saying that the water in Mr Oakes's pond was blacker than the coal it came off, and nobody believed the lotus in it could bloom. Ruth Oakes did not argue. She went down the spoil path each morning before the cage horn, a flask in her coat, and counted the leaves the way her father had taught her, pinching the stems to see which were still green under the slime.

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The colliery was to close at Michaelmas. The letter from the Coal Board lay on the kitchen dresser under the salt, and it said the land would be levelled and sown with grass for the new estate. Ruth read it twice, then went out to the pond with a bucket and a pair of cut-down gloves, meaning to lift the root before the diggers came, though she could not have said where she would put it.

The bud was up that morning, the first in three summers, folded tight as a fist and holding a pale shine above the scum. She knelt on the boards laid across the water and watched it. A shift whistle sounded from the far headgear, then another, and the sound seemed to go out over the whole valley and come back thinner.

She didn't lift the root. She left the bucket on the bank, and when the sun cleared the heap the petals opened one at a time, clean and white against the coal dust, as if the water had never been dark at all.