Black and white photo of a fine line lotus tattoo with a dotted line below it on the upper back of a woman in a white vest top, hands raised to her head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus tattoo on upper back

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows a woman seen from behind with her hands raised to her head, wearing a white vest top. A black ink lotus flower sits centrally on her upper back, drawn with fine outlines and dotted shading, with a vertical line of dots running below it. The image is black and white, with a soft light source at the upper right and a plain dark background.

Dotwork Botanical Back Lotus Flower Dot Dotted line Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide on Skerrow goes out so far that the ferry sits on the mud like a stranded gull, and you walk the causeway with a paper parcel of salt cod under one arm and a tin of matches in your coat. Your grandmother's instruction was always the same: follow the dots. Someone had pressed a row of white pebbles into the sand, one every long stride, from the slipway to the chapel rock, and nobody on the island could remember who had laid them or why.

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Halfway out, where the flats turn grey and smell faintly of iron, the line passes a shallow brine pond left in the old salt pans. A pale lily grows there, opening only at the turn of the tide, and today its petals are unfolding in tight rings, eight of them, laid out the way the painted circle on the chapel floor is drawn. You kneel on the cold ridge and count them with a wet finger. Beneath the water, a dotted trail of pebbles keeps going, bending where the lily's stem runs down into the silt.

The path does not reach the chapel after all. The last pebble sits by itself at the edge of the pond, and there is no next one. You understand then that the stones were never meant to carry you across, only to bring you here at the hour the water is most still. You take the spare pebble from your pocket, the one you had been saving, and set it down where the line ends.

By the time you stand, the sea is already sliding back over the flats in thin silver sheets. The lily closes its rings one by one. You walk home with the water at your heels, counting the stones under your feet and finding, to your surprise, that you have stopped minding how many there are.