Black and grey photograph of a fine line lotus flower tattoo on an ankle, with the foot pointed down.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus tattoo on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a bare foot and lower leg, with a lotus flower tattooed above the ankle bone. The lotus has delicate outlines and light grey shading on its layered petals. The foot is shown in profile against a plain, pale background.

Fine line Botanical Ankle Lotus Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Skerrow fished the salt pond after the storm that took the bell from the chapel tower. The boats still went out past the breakwater as they always had, but they kept to the grey water beyond the rocks, and when Ada Pellow asked her grandmother why, the old woman only pointed her chin at the pond and told her to mind the tide.

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Ada went anyway, the spring she turned twelve, rowing her father's dinghy into the reeds with a knife and a cold pie wrapped in cloth. At the centre of the pond, where the water lay flat and the colour of pewter, a single lotus floated open on its broad leaves. It was pale as the inside of a shell. Beneath it, in the mud, the bell lay green with age, and when the wind dropped she could hear it humming faintly, the way a jar hums when you blow across its neck.

She did not cut the flower. She had heard the stories: take a thing from the pond and the sea takes a man in its place. So she sat in the dinghy until the light went, and she talked to the lily the way her grandmother talked to the gulls, about the price of salt and which boys at school had been unkind. When she rowed home the humming had stopped, and the next morning the fleet came in whole, forty boats strong, every man counted off the slip.

Her grandmother met her on the steps and said nothing. She only took the knife from Ada's belt and dropped it in the bait bucket. Ever after, the men of Skerrow fished the far end of the pond on quiet days, and nobody drowned there. Each summer the lotus still opens on the still water, and the old women leave a crust on the breakwater for whoever tends it.