Black and grey dotwork lotus tattoo on the side of a woman's ribs, with her arm raised and a fringed metallic wrap draped over her side.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus tattoo on a ribcage in profile

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is shown in side profile with one arm raised, her hair falling behind her, and a fringed metallic garment draped over her torso. A small ornate lotus or mandala design sits on the side of her ribs, built from fine lines and stippled shading. The tattoo is in black and grey against a plain pale blue background, and it is the focal point of the composition.

Botanical Dotwork Ribs Lotus Flower Mandala Ornamental

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bead tin has been open on your bench since Tuesday, and still the copper ones are missing. Mrs Adeyemi rings the shop every morning to ask whether the fringe is finished, and every morning you tell her that fringe cannot be hurried. Three hundred strands of bronze thread, each cut to the length of your forearm, must be knotted by hand onto a sheet of silk that has already been pinned, unpinned and pinned again.

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The lotus is the last thing you draw. Her grandmother's pattern is a single sheet of tracing paper gone soft at the folds, and on it a flower opens in rings, petal inside petal, with a dotted border so fine you have to hold the paper to the window to see it. You trace it onto the silk lining in blue chalk, then stitch it in black thread, one stipple at a time, the way the old pattern asks. It takes four evenings. Your eyes ache, and you stop counting the dots somewhere past nine hundred.

On the morning of the wedding the bronze fringe catches the light from the church door and throws it back in long, restless streaks. Nobody will see the lotus, tucked against the side of the panel where the arm will cover it. You know it is there. You checked every knot, ran a thumb along every stitch, and when the last strand was tied off you found the copper beads in the pocket of your apron, where they had been all along.

Mrs Adeyemi rings at noon to say the dancing has started. You tell her the fringe will hold. Later a photograph arrives from the shop, blurred and out of focus, showing a sleeve of bronze swinging across a dance floor, and you zoom in until the pixels break up, looking for the one place where your flower is still closed.