Black linework lotus with dotwork petals and blue and pink watercolour splashes, tattooed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lotus with watercolour splashes on upper back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower with ornamental linework and hanging drop details sits at the centre of the composition. The petals are outlined in black and shaded with stippled dotwork, while the background is filled with loose blue, pink and purple washes that drip downwards. The photograph is taken straight on, showing the upper back with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Botanical Dotwork Back Lotus Mandala Watercolour splash Ornament Drip Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Majestic's ballroom smells of Brylcreem and wet overcoats, and you are the only girl on the floor with ink under her fingernails. On Saturday nights the band plays until the chandeliers hum, and you sit at the edge with a sketchbook on your knee, drawing the same flower again and again: a lotus with its petals stacked like the tiers of a wedding cake, its centre pricked with fine black dots.

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Dorothy from the cloakroom leans over one night and asks what it's meant to be. Water, you tell her, though really it is something a sailor described to you on the pier, a flower that opens out of mud and never once looks dirty. She laughs and says you'd better not let Leonard see you drawing during the foxtrots. Leonard sees everything, and on Thursday he calls you into his office and hands you two pots of ink and a jar of rose wash for the back wall, because the Jubilee dance is in a fortnight and the plaster looks like a hospital corridor.

So you paint the lotus in black at the centre, shade its petals with a thousand tiny stipples, and let the blue and pink bleed out around it. When the wash is wet you tilt the ladder and let the colour run, so the watercolour trickles down the plaster in long thin tongues, pooling in the grout and stopping just above the skirting.

On Monday the boards are waxed and the wall has dried, and the drips are still there, a band of blue and rose at the height of a dancer's hem. Leonard stands in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and asks who did it. Dorothy points at you. You go back to your chair at the edge of the floor, open the sketchbook, and start the flower again.