Black and grey neo-traditional lotus tattoo with dotted detail and blue, teal and pink watercolour splashes on the side of the ribs.

Lotus with watercolour splashes on ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A detailed lotus flower sits on the side of the ribs, with layered petals shaded in black and grey and outlined in bold black lines. Small dots decorate the petals and the centre, and loose watercolour washes in blue, teal, purple and pink spread behind the design. A purple fabric top covers the upper edge of the frame, and the composition is centred on the tattoo.

Neo-trad Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Watercolour Dot Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the seed packet in your grandfather's coat, the one still hanging behind the scullery door since the colliery closed. Inside is a twist of brown paper holding a handful of dry, pale beans and a note in his square pencil hand: Put these where the tip used to drain. Nobody in Skelder Fold has ever seen a lotus. Your grandfather had only seen one in a Sunday school book, and he never said why he kept the seeds.

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The settling pond above the pit is black at the edges and the colour of weak tea in the middle. Nothing grows there. Ellen Dobbs from chapel says it is a fool's errand, and the lads on the wall shout that you'll be wanting a gardener's licence next. You scrape a hollow in the silt with a tablespoon, push the seeds down, and walk home with grey hands to a tea that tastes of iron.

Nobody expects anything, so you stop expecting. Then one June morning a pale green shoulder breaks the surface, and by the weekend there is a flower the size of a dinner plate. Its petals are layered like the slates on the chapel roof, outlined in a black that the men would recognise from their own pit lamps, and speckled with dots like coal dust caught in the light. Behind it the sky above the tip has turned blue, teal and a bruised pink, as if the whole valley had decided to show off.

On the Sunday evening the wind drops and the water goes still. Ellen comes up the path with her hymnbook under her arm, stops, and looks for a long time. Then she sits down beside you in the dust and says nothing at all, which from Ellen is a sermon. In the pond the flower sits on its own reflection, petals open, as though the water had been holding its breath for forty years and had finally let it out.