Black outline lotus flower tattoo with a curling stem on the back of a person's neck, shown in a sepia-toned photo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus with curling stem on the neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A single lotus flower sits at the centre of the frame, drawn as bold black outlines with inner petals that loop into one another. A long, tapering stem curls at its base, and the tattoo is shown against soft skin with dark hair at the top of the image. The sepia tone and vintage border give the photo an antique feel, and the ink reads as solid black with no shading.

Botanical Neck Lotus Flower Stem Petal Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed came over on the Mairi Ann in a tin that once held boiled sweets, wrapped in a dead man's oilskin. Nobody on Skerrow knew what it was. My grandmother planted it in the peat pond behind the kirk because the water stayed warm there, and because she said anything that had come so far deserved a bit of trying.

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For three summers it gave us leaves like pewter plates and nothing else. The men laughed at her. I drew it instead, on the backs of the tide tables, hunting for the shape the stem wanted. It never went straight. It always bent back on itself at the foot, as if the plant was listening for something under the water.

In the fourth August the bloom came up through the mud in a single night. The petals opened like letters being read for the second time, and the whole island walked out in wellingtons to look. Gran was already in the churchyard by then. The week after, I took the tin and the last pencil stub down to the ferry slip and stood at the rail while Skerrow shrank behind us.

Somewhere past the skerries I unfolded the tide table and saw what I had been drawing all along. The curl was not a bend towards the light. It was the stem holding on to the bottom so the flower would not drift out to sea. I folded the paper back up and kept my hand on it until the mainland rose grey and ordinary in front of us.