Black ink and pink watercolour lotus flower on a tall stem with ornate dotwork and swirl-patterned leaves, shown as a tattoo design drawing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lotus with dotwork leaves

Botanical · Mixed · Flash

A pink watercolour lotus flower sits atop a long stem with fine black linework and small pink floral motifs on its petals. Below, several leaves are filled with dense black dots, hatching and swirling paisley-like patterns. The drawing is centred on a white background with the stem extending to a sprig of small leaves at the top.

Botanical Dotwork Lotus Flower Leaves Stem Swirl Dot Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae Thorne had worked the narrowboat Patience up and down the Ouse for thirty-one summers before the river gave her anything strange. It was the dry August the water dropped a foot below the lock cill, and she found the lotus in the reeds below Sallow Lock, a pink head on a black stem where no lotus had any business growing this far north. Its petals opened at dawn and closed by dusk, as if it kept the hours of someone who was not there.

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She cut a single stem with her galley knife and carried it home in a jam jar. By evening the leaves had darkened with dots, fine as spilt pepper, and curled into spirals like the tails of a sleeping cat. Her husband Dafydd, who had panelled the cabin with his own hands and never once misread a flood, looked at it over his tea and said a flower that opened in the wrong hours was owed something. Mae said it was owed water. He said that was not what he meant.

In the night the stem pushed through the neck of the jar and hung over the table edge, and in the morning the petals had bled a faint rose into the cloth. Mae rowed the dinghy back to Sallow Lock with the jar wrapped in a wet tea towel and set the plant in the slack water under the gate, where the reeds began. The lock-keeper's boy watched from the balance beam and asked whether she was giving it back or giving it up.

She didn't answer him. She stood until the flower had turned its face to the last of the light, then she took the empty jar home. Three days later the river came up brown and fast with rain from the hills, and the Patience, which had sat on the mud since August, lifted off without a sound. Dafydd found a spiral leaf caught on the tiller pin, dry and dotted, and he kept it in the cabin where the lamp could reach it.