Pink and black lotus flower tattoo with concentric ripple rings and pink paint-like drips across the middle of the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink lotus with ripples on the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large lotus flower sits at the centre of the back, with its petals shaded in magenta and outlined in loose black linework. Concentric ripple rings radiate outwards and fade into the skin, with pink drips running down below the flower. The pink wash is bold and saturated against the pale skin, while the black lines stay sketchy and open.

Botanical Back Lotus Flower Water Drip Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had the pond rake in one hand and a lantern in the other when the water began to ripple, though there was no wind in the yard. He had sworn to the abbot that the lotus was dead. Every frost for forty winters it had sunk to the mud and every spring it had come back, but this year the roots had rotted in the cold, or so he said, and he had cut the stalks himself at Michaelmas and carried them to the midden.

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The first ring spread out from the centre, then another, each wider and fainter, until the rings reached the foot of the wall and climbed it. Where they touched the stones, the grey turned to a colour Anselm had no word for, a deep rose that ran down the moss in threads like spilt wine. Brother Edwin, who was deaf in one ear and proud of it, said it looked like a bruise. Anselm said it looked like the inside of a shell, and they argued about that until the abbot came down the steps in his bare feet.

The abbot knelt at the edge and watched the flower lift itself out of the mud, petals heavy and shining, and he said nothing for a long while. Then Anselm went to the midden to fetch a fork and found the heap was empty. Every stalk he had thrown there had gone down through the muck into the pond, and the pond had kept them.

By dawn the flower sat on the water like a lamp someone had forgotten to blow out. The rings went on widening long after the bell, out past the wall and across the frozen fields, as if the pond had decided at last to tell the valley what it had been keeping under its breath.