Black linework tattoo of a naga serpent, lotus flowers and swirling waves covering a leg from thigh to calf.

Naga serpent and lotus leg tattoo

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers a leg from upper thigh to calf, showing a serpent-like naga with scale patterning, lotus blooms, flames and wave motifs. The work is built from fine and medium black outlines with cross-hatched scale fills and dense ornamental scrollwork. The photo is taken outdoors with a motorbike and patterned tiled floor behind the leg, and the ink is all black and grey.

Thigh Calf Serpent Lotus Wave Scale Flame Scrollwork Leg

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pham on the fourteenth floor had a rule about the lift. You did not step in when its doors opened on a wet night unless you had something to give it, a coin, a heel of bread, a kind word. My mum laughed at her for it. Then the lift stopped between nine and ten for an hour in February, and nobody laughed after that.

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She told me the rest on her balcony, pegs in her mouth, while the canal below the estate turned the colour of tin. Under the water, she said, lived a serpent older than the bricks, with seven hoods and scales like the lids of cooking pans. When the river rose, it lifted its head, and lotus flowers opened on the surface, but only for people who fed it. Her husband had tossed bread onto the towpath every morning for thirty years. When he died, the bread stopped, and the water came up through the car park.

I asked Dennis the caretaker if any of it was true. He pointed at the rain sliding off the walkway and said the drains had been blocked since 1987, which was not an answer. Still, that Sunday I found myself on the towpath at six with a crust in my coat pocket, feeling a fool, my breath smoking. The water lay flat and black. Then ripples opened in a slow ring, and something turned beneath, a long coil shining like wet slate, and a single pale bloom rose and sat open on the surface, as if it had been waiting for me to be polite.

I broke the bread into pieces and dropped them one by one. The bloom closed, opened, closed again. On Monday morning there was a tin of condensed milk outside my door, no note, just a lotus petal pressed flat under the lid, and when I pressed the button for the lift it came straight down without a sound.