Realistic coloured tattoo of a pink lotus flower with yellow stamens and grey wash shading on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lotus flower on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A pink and red lotus bloom with yellow stamens sits at the centre of the design, with its petals rendered in soft gradients of light and dark. Smooth grey shading behind the flower suggests water or smoke and gives depth. The strong colour contrasts with the monochrome background, and the flower is centred on the limb against a plain white towel.

Realism Botanical Forearm Lotus Flower Petal Stamen Water

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold had been tied at the bend below Hallow Lock for three winters when the water lily came up through the silt beside her stern. Nobody planted it. Old Tobias Reed said the river had sent it, the way it sent drowned gloves and bottle glass, and he cut the first bloom to stand in a jam jar on the galley table.

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That summer it opened every morning, pink at the edges and red at the heart, with a crown of yellow dust that his daughter Nell said looked like sparks off a forge. Mist lay grey on the backwater until noon and clung low around the hull. Boatmen coming through the lock slowed to look, then went on quicker, because nobody likes to be seen staring at a flower that opens in fog.

In September the lock-keeper's boy came down the towpath with word that the water board meant to dredge the bend and the barges had to shift. Tobias said they would go. Nell asked what would become of the lily. He stood a long while on the deck, then untied the mooring rope and let the Marigold drift out into the current at dusk.

They tied up at the next bend, and in April Nell went back to the old place with a bucket, expecting to find only scraped clay. Instead a single bloom stood on the water beside the new mooring, pink at the edges, as though the river had simply carried it along with them.