Back of a woman's head with a lotus design shaved into the nape undercut, and a small black ink tattoo on her upper arm.

Lotus shaved into nape undercut

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her dark hair in a loose top knot and a lotus-like design shaved into the hair at the nape. A small black ink tattoo of a palm tree and mountain shapes sits on her upper arm at the left edge of the frame. The warm, hazy light from a window and the blurred palm trees outside give the composition a soft, sunlit feel.

Upper arm Lotus Palm tree Mountain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The clippers had been running since six, and Dulcie Farrant had stopped hearing them the way she stopped hearing the lorries on the Ashgrove road. Outside the window the heat sat over the car park like water that wouldn't drain. Her last client of the morning had come in off the highway with a sketch folded inside a paper napkin, asking for something small enough to hide under a knot of hair.

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The sketch was a lotus, its petals drawn in biro that had nearly run dry. Dulcie had only seen lotuses in books, and once in the glasshouse at the county fair, where a man in a sun hat told her they could lie under mud for years and still open. She told the stranger the lines would sting less than the idea of them. She fitted a guard to the clippers, pressed the blade flat, and began at the lowest point of the nape where the hair grew thinnest.

The work took patience. She shaved the outer petals first, then the inner ones, reading the curve of the skull the way her grandmother had taught her to read a field before ploughing. Halfway through, the stranger asked whether it would grow back. Dulcie said yes, in six weeks or so, and that the lines would be softer by then. It was a lie she had told before, and she believed it each time. Beyond the glass a dust devil lifted a plastic bag off the kerb and carried it past the petrol pumps.

When she finished she held up the mirror so the stranger could see the design under the knot, pale against the dark like a bloom resting on still water. The stranger touched it with two fingers and said nothing for a long while. Then she paid in coins, asked if the shop kept a broom, and swept the loose hair off the step herself while the wind pulled half of it toward the road.