Purple lotus flower with grey ripples in shaded water, tattooed on the upper arm in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Purple lotus on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large lotus flower with a green stem sits on the upper arm, with its petals shaded from lilac to deeper violet. Beneath it, grey ripples in soft shading suggest a pond surface. The flower is centred on the arm, with the curve of the muscle shaping the composition.

Botanical Upper arm Lotus Flower Water Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus had sulked all through March, its leaves curled like wet paper on the surface of the tank, and Mrs Pell swore it would not flower again before the summer fair. Nobody in Calver Bridge believed a bloom could come out of a glasshouse behind the chapel, not with the coal smoke settling over the roofs every afternoon. But the bulb had come up from London in a tin box packed with wet moss, a gift from a nephew who had sailed east and never written back, and she had never once thrown it out.

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On the Thursday the boy from the forge came in with his cap full of pond water and a question he did not want to ask. His sister had been sent to the sanatorium at Holm, and the doctor had written to say she would not be home for the harvest. Mrs Pell took the cap from him, tipped the water into the tank, and said nothing about the frogspawn floating in it.

The bud opened that night, so quietly that she only noticed at five, when the light came grey through the panes. Its petals were lilac at the base and deepened to violet at the tips, the colour of the dye she had once bought for her wedding gloves. Rings from the boy's water still ran outwards across the surface, and the flower sat in the middle of them as if it had been waiting for someone to make the pond move.

She cut one stem and wrapped it in newspaper for the forge. The boy took it without looking at her, and walked the long way home past the river, holding it up like a lantern.