Black and grey lotus tattoo with pink, purple and teal watercolour splashes on a forearm, with dotwork shading and dotted accents.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A large lotus flower with layered petals and ornate inner details sits across the forearm, drawn in black linework with dotted shading. Loose splashes of pink, purple, blue and teal wash behind and below the flower, with small dotted lines and diamond shapes trailing downwards. The background is a blurred graffiti wall, and the arm fills most of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Forearm Lotus Flower Watercolour Splash Dot Diamond Mandala

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus was my aunt's idea, painted on the back wall of the Velvet Parade long before the canvas went grey. She mixed her colours in jam jars on the caravan step: pink from crushed rose petals and a little ochre, teal from the copper sulphate she kept for the lions' trough. Nobody else in the company could make water look like it was moving under paint.

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By the third winter the Parade had sold its elephant and its ring curtains, and the only act left was Dorrie on the wire, who insisted the lights go down before she climbed. We paid the fuel with raffle tickets. On the last Saturday in Hallowcross the wind got under the big top and tore the banner in two, so the lotus lay in the mud with its petals split along the seam.

Dorrie climbed anyway. She went up the rope with the torn cloth knotted at her waist, and the dots of light from the caravan lamps came loose from the guy wires and drifted down past her like sparks off a dropped cigarette. I held the ladder and counted them. Seventeen, then nineteen, then I lost count because my aunt was crying quietly into her jar of teal.

When Dorrie came down we folded the lotus into a suitcase, half of it still blank, and nobody said the word closing. My aunt dabbed one drop of wet paint onto the bottom rung of the ladder so we would remember where we had stood. I still have that ladder in the shed, and I have not yet decided which of us was the one who stayed.