Black linework lotus tattoo with blue, pink and purple watercolour splashes across a person's upper back.

Lotus with watercolour splashes on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large lotus flower is outlined in black with ornate detailing in the petals, including scroll motifs and dotted shading. Soft blue, pink and purple watercolour washes spread behind and through the petals, with splatter marks extending beyond the outline. The tattoo is centred on the upper back against warm skin, with the top of the shoulders and neck visible at the edges of the frame.

Botanical Back Lotus Flower Mandala Watercolour Splatter Ornament Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the chapel on Scarrow was never meant to hold anything but frogs, so when the boy from the ferry turned up with a crate of tinned paint and asked for lilies, I told him the water would only take them if they were drawn. Nobody on the island kept a bloom in a jar. We had the mainland catalogue and my grandmother's shawl, which had a border of curled leaves worked in black thread along the fringe.

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I drew the lotus on the chapel wall first, the way she taught me, petals pointed like the prows of little boats, each one shaded with dots pricked from the tip of a sharpened nail. The scrolls came easily. The colour was harder. I wanted blue for the cold morning, pink for the hour the gulls go quiet, and a purple I had mixed from the dregs of an ink bottle that once belonged to the lighthouse keeper's wife. I flicked it wet from the brush and it spread through the petals like weather moving across the sound.

Mrs Tully from the shop said it looked as though the flower had been caught in a squall. She was right, and I did not tell her the squall was my fault. My hand jerked when I laid the third colour, and the paint leapt off the bristles in little stars that landed on the stone well past the outline. I stood there with a rag in my fist, ready to scrub them away, then saw that the splashes made the petals look as if they were still opening.

The ferry came for the boy on Thursday. The chapel wall stayed as it was. When the tide turned under the pier that evening, the pond behind the chapel lay perfectly still, and the lotus was there in the water, blue and pink and bleeding softly at its edges, as if it had always grown there.