Black and white photo of a woman in a fitted top, showing a black ink peony tattoo on her upper arm and a dotwork lotus mandala tattoo on her thigh.

Peony and lotus mandala tattoos on arm and thigh

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a woman's hip and torso in a fitted top, with her arm bent at the side. A botanical peony with shaded petals and leaves sits on the upper arm, and a symmetrical lotus mandala built from fine linework and stippled dots covers the outer thigh. The image is monochrome, so the ink appears as black and grey, and the framing is close and cropped below the face.

Botanical Dotwork Upper arm Thigh Peony Lotus Mandala Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus opened before the steward arrived, which Master Wen said was the pond's way of making a fool of anyone who came late. I stood on the wooden bridge with the ledger under my arm and counted petals. Eight rings of them, each one laid out the way Wen had taught me with compass and rule, every point lined up to the thread he had strung across the water years before.

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The steward wanted peonies. He wanted a hundred stems cut that morning, wrapped in damp silk for the palace in the capital, and he wanted the ledger to say they had come from the eastern beds. I told him the eastern beds were still in shade. He tapped his fan against his palm and said the emperor did not care about shade. Wen had taught me that a garden is a promise made to the weather, and I had no intention of breaking it for a man who could not tell a peony from a cabbage.

So I took him along the outer path instead, where the shaded petals of the older plants had gone the colour of dark wine and the leaves were still folded tight. I let him look. I let him count. He left with nine stems, which was more than he deserved and fewer than he wanted, and he wrote the number in his own book with a scowl.

That night I opened the ledger and drew a new ring beside the lotus, a ninth row of points, and in the margin I wrote the steward's name beside a single empty space. Wen would have approved. The lotus floats on its own circle, the peonies wait on theirs, and the gap in the drawing is exactly the width of one patient man's disappointment.