Colour tattoo on a forearm of an orange lotus flower with black outline, a thin black stem curving into a black line heart, and a small black abstract mark below.

Orange lotus and line heart on forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A photograph of a healed or fresh tattoo on the forearm showing an orange lotus flower with a black outline and shaded petals. A thin black stem curves down from the flower into an outlined heart shape with a small dot, and a black abstract mark of two vertical strokes with an arc sits below. The linework is bold and clean with flat, soft-shaded orange ink, set against a plain skin background.

Botanical Forearm Lotus Heart Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ottilie Vane was the last keeper of the drowned pond at Scarrow, and everybody in the lower villages knew she would not give up the seed. The water had gone brown the summer the sea came over the sluice wall, and nothing grew there for forty winters after that. Then one March a lotus put its head up through the silt, orange as a coal, on a stalk as thin as thread.

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The men from the salt towns came with their carts and their offers. They wanted the bloom sealed in glass for the lantern markets, where a flower that opened in clean water fetched more than a sack of grain. Ottilie told them the pond was not hers to sell. She said the stem had to be followed down to the bend where it curled into a heart, because the old almanacs had drawn it that way for a reason, and nobody living had bothered to ask what the reason was.

So she waded out at low tide with a bucket and a hooked stick. She found the root under the mud, wound round a little stone with a hole through its middle, and beside the stone a mark scratched by someone long dead: two upright strokes and a bowed line beneath them, like a gate left half open.

She did not dig the root out. She sat on the bank until the tide came back and lifted the petals clear of the mud. When the salt men returned in the morning, the pond was full and the lotus stood in it, and Ottilie only shook her head and told them to come back when the gate had been mended.