Pink lotus flower tattoo with a black outline and yellow centre on the back of a hand, with buds and petals across the wrist in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lotus tattoo on the back of a hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A large lotus flower fills the back of a hand, with pink and red petals outlined in bold black linework and a yellow centre. Smaller buds, a teal-tinted bud and loose petals are scattered up towards the wrist, and red flowers are visible on the forearm above. The soft gradient shading on the petals contrasts with the solid black outline, and the hand is photographed close up against a light background.

Neo-trad Botanical Hand Lotus Flower Bud Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dredgers left the inner basin at Porthavel with a rusted winch and a heap of grey silt, and nobody expected anything to grow from it. You go down the slipway at low water with a bucket and a borrowed trowel, because your aunt says the mud has smelled sour since the winter, and that is where you find a pale green stalk pushing up through the ooze like a question.

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At the top of the stalk sits a single bud, tight and rose-coloured, with a dark sheen where the light catches it. Nobody on the quay can say where it came from. Old Tom Rowe, who has mended nets for fifty years, swears a tea chest from the Far East went down with the Marigold in 1911 and that seeds outlast sailors. You do not argue. You carry the bucket home and fill the galvanised tub on the back step with rainwater.

It opens over four days. First the petals fold back at their edges, then the red bleeds inward, and on the fourth morning the centre is a gold crown of seed pods that the gulls pretend not to notice. The harbour gathers to look. A man from the lifeboat station takes a photograph. Your aunt says nothing. She stands with her arms folded while the tide comes in behind her, and then she goes inside and comes back with two mugs.

In August the gales strip the flower, and you find one petal caught on the slipway, paper-thin and still faintly pink. You keep it in the tin where you store sea glass. The next spring there are forty green stems in the basin, and the fishermen have stopped calling it the dead dock.