Colour tattoo of a pink lotus flower with a yellow centre above black script lettering, on the upper arm, in a realism and lettering style.

Pink lotus with script quote on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic pink lotus flower with layered petals and a yellow stamen centre sits above a line of black cursive script that reads "Learn to live like the Lotus flower, untouched by the filthy water it lives in." The petals use soft shading and blended pinks and purples, while the script has clean, even linework. The tattoo is centred on a close crop of skin with a dark vignette around the edges.

Botanical Lettering Realism Upper arm Lotus Flower Petal Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the chapel at Skerrow Head had been fouled since the mill went up the valley, and every spring the old women said the lotus would not come back. Ada Venn kept the lamp at the point below it, and she thought the old women were wrong, because she had seen the bud push up through the grey scum one June, pale at the tip and pink at the seams.

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She told nobody. The lighthouse keeper's boy came up each Thursday with the paraffin and the bread, and he laughed at the mud on her boots. Let him laugh. She went down to the pond at dusk with a jar and a stick and lifted the bloom out clean, the water running off its petals like it had never been near anything. Then she set it on the sill of the lamp room, where the glass was warm from the flame, and it opened by morning.

The gulls came to look at it. The mill men came too, cursing the smoke that was in their own lungs. Ada kept the wick trimmed and the glass polished and said nothing, and the lotus stayed the colour of a fresh burn for three weeks, then folded itself shut and sank to the floor of the lamp room like a stone.

When the boy swept it up he found the seed heads inside, black as coal and dry as biscuit. He pressed one into the wet ground by the chapel wall, and the next spring there was a green leaf standing up out of the muck, and the old women came out in their shawls to look at it, and nobody said a word about the water.