Black and grey lotus tattoo with dotwork petals and three small circles above it, placed on the centre of a person's upper back.

Lotus with dotwork petals on upper back

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower is drawn in black outline across the centre of the upper back, with three small open circles stacked above its tip. The petals are shaded with stippled dots, short dashes and solid black fills, while the outer petals are left as clean single lines. The skin is pale with freckles, and the tattoo sits centrally between the shoulder blades against a plain background with a patterned garment at the bottom edge.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Flower Circle Mandala Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and keep your hands out of the water, because the lake remembers who touches it. Halvenmere had one lake, and at its heart grew a single lotus that opened only once in a reign. The court clerks counted its petals each spring with ink and patience. Forty-one petals, the ledgers said, and every petal carried its own dots, and no two petals carried the same.

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Ilse Varrow was the clerk who drew the lotus that year, and she could not sleep for the drought. The river had gone to a thread. She sat under the lamp with a steel nib, stippling the inner petals until her wrist cramped, dashing the outer ones with short strokes like rain falling sideways. On the third night, when the lake had shrunk to a dish, three rings spread across its surface from nothing, one after another, as though three coins had been dropped from a great height.

She saw then what the dots were. They were not ornament but a map, each cluster placed where a spring lay under the hills, and the three circles above the bloom marked the three the king had sealed with lead and told no one about. Ilse took her bell and her lamp and walked the old causeway before dawn, counting dots aloud the way the grandmothers taught her, and at the third seal she pressed her palm to the cold metal and felt it hum.

The lotus opened that morning with a sound like a shutter lifting. When the clerks came to write the year's count, they found forty-one petals and one more that had not been there before, drawn in fresh ink in the margin of the ledger, with a single dot at its tip. Nobody in Halvenmere has ever been able to say who put it there. Mind the step going out.