Small colour tattoo of a pink lotus flower with a green stem on the upper chest, in a soft botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lotus on the upper chest

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A small lotus flower with pink petals, a deeper pink centre bud, and yellow tones at the base of the petals sits on the upper chest. The petals are softly shaded with gradients, and a thin green stem extends downward. The flower is centred on a plain skin background, with a blue patterned garment visible at the bottom edge of the frame.

Botanical Chest Lotus Flower Petal Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The seed came out of Nan's tea tin in April, wrapped in a darned sock that smelled of diesel and mothballs. She had carried it up and down the cut for eleven years without planting it, and when I asked why, she said some things needed the right bit of water. Our mooring below Culvert Bridge was the right bit if you squinted: a backwater gone green at the edges, with the towpath on one side and a heron who considered it his.

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Dad said it would rot. Dad said most things rotted, including the barge, which had been leaking at the stern since before I was born. I pushed the seed into the silt in a jam jar with holes punched in the lid, and every morning for six weeks I went out with a mug of tea and checked. A leaf came first, flat and blue-green, sitting on the water like a saucer. Then a stem as thick as a pencil, rising out of the mud into the light.

The bud broke the week the letter came from the marina. We had until the end of the month to pay the mooring or move on, and Dad had already started taping newspaper over the cabin windows. I went out at dawn, before the walkers, and there it was: one pink bud leaning towards the sun, its outer petals blushing yellow at the base as if someone had held a match to them. I sat on the gunwale with my tea going cold and didn't call anyone.

We are still here. The mooring fee was paid by a woman from the boatyard who came to see the flower and stayed for a cup of tea. Nan's tin sits on the shelf above the stove now, empty but for one dried petal, and every August I cut the new bloom and float it on the brown water, where it looks, for a morning at least, as if it has always belonged to the cut.