Red and black lotus tattoo with an Om symbol above it on the lower back, with fine swirling linework and dotwork accents.

Om and lotus on lower back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A lotus flower in red ink with black swirl motifs in the petals sits beneath a bold black Om symbol. Thin brown linework curls around the flower and dotted accents frame each side. The red shading fades toward the edges of the petals, and the lotus is centred on the lower back.

Botanical Dotwork Back Om Lotus Flower Swirl Dot Linework

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mill pond had gone still the way it did before rain, and Tamsin Wraye stood at the sluice with her boots full of cold water, counting the pads that had not opened. Her grandmother said the red lotus only came up in years when the beeches dropped their seed early, and this was that year, though nobody in Hollin Cross had seen one since the flood took the old boathouse and most of the reeds with it.

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Her brother Elias laughed at her from the bank, his coat buttoned wrong, holding the lantern up as if the water might confess something. She ignored him and waded to the reed bed, where she found a single bud wrapped in a thread of brown bark, the same twine her grandmother used for tying herb bundles. Beneath it, pressed into the mud, was a flat stone with a spiral cut into its face, the same whorl as the one carved above the chapel door.

She knelt in the water and did what her grandmother had done over shelling peas, humming the low note that rounds in the mouth and never quite leaves it. The thread loosened. The petals came apart slowly, red as the rose hips on the hedgerow and paler at the tips, and the black swirls inside them turned like something unwinding from a spindle. Elias stopped laughing somewhere around the second petal.

The bloom did not stay open. When the first window lit in Hollin Cross the flower began to fold, and Tamsin understood, with the cold climbing her shins, that it had opened for the hum and not for the light. So she kept humming. She hummed until the stars came out over the beeches and her throat was raw, and Elias knelt beside her in the water, and after a while he found the note himself and let her carry the rest. By morning the lotus stood wide on the pond, and Tamsin's palms were stained the colour of it.