Black and grey dotwork lotus flower tattoo with fine line outline and the word namaste in script on the forearm.

Lotus with namaste script on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A lotus flower with layered petals sits on the forearm, with the word namaste written in script beneath it and small dots falling from the top right. The petals are filled with stippled dotwork shading that gives them depth, while the outlines and script use clean fine lines. The tattoo is centred on the arm against a plain skin background, with a patterned sleeve and a ring visible at the edge of the frame.

Dotwork Botanical Fine line Forearm Lotus Flower Script Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus came up on the Tuesday, three weeks after the frost had given up on the pond at Hollin Farm. Dad would have said it was too early, that you could never trust anything in Yorkshire before June, but he was the one who pushed the root into the mud and then limped back indoors to sulk about his knee. I stood at the edge in my wellies and counted the leaves as if they owed me money.

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Mrs Okafor from the post office gave me the root in an old biscuit tin, wrapped in newspaper gone soft with damp. She said her mother had kept one in a bucket on a windowsill in Enugu and it had flowered every year regardless. I doubted it. I doubted most things that autumn, including the word you wrote at the bottom of your last card, the one that made it sound like a thing people say at the end of a yoga class and not a promise. Still, I chalked it on the slate by the gate, where Dad used to write the weather, and watched the rain pock the water around it.

This morning the bud had split, its layers pale at the tips and greying toward the middle where the light never reached. I sat on the upturned crate and tried to draw it in the back of the seed catalogue. My lines came out wobbly, so I went over them with the fine pen from your dresser drawer, dot by dot, until the petals had the shading you always said they needed.

I've enclosed a photograph. It isn't much to look at, just mud, a slate and a flower, but I wanted you to see that it lived. Come and see it before the heron does. The kettle's on and the gate still sticks. Lift it with your hip.