Red lotus flower tattoo with a long thin stem on skin, shaded in soft red tones and placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lotus flower on upper back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A single lotus flower with layered, pointed petals and a long curving stem, drawn in fine dark red linework. The petals are softly shaded with red wash that fades to pale skin at the edges, giving a delicate, watercolour-like effect. The flower sits centrally against a plain, lightly lit area of skin with no other elements in frame.

Fine line Botanical Back Lotus Flower Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond behind the dye works had been drained twice in Edith's lifetime, and both times the lotus came back up through the silt before anyone thought to plant it. Her father swore it was the same root, handed down like a grudge. He kept the madder beds on the far bank and never once cut a stem for the house.

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The summer the mill was sold, Edith waded out in her boots to the shallow shelf where the stems grew thickest. The buds were splitting open, red at the tips and pale at the heart, and the water was warm enough to stand in. She cut one long stem with the sheep shears, slowly, the way her father cut cloth, and carried it back up the towpath with the water running down her wrist.

Tom was stacking crates in the yard when she came through the gate. He looked at the flower, then at her muddy hem, and asked what she meant to do with it. She said she meant to put it on the windowsill of the empty counting house, since everything else in the building had already been sold and labelled and carried off.

She filled a jar with rainwater and set the stem in it. By morning the petals had bled a faint rose into the water, and the jar held the colour of the old vats, pale at the rim and deep at the stem. Tom came to look and said nothing for a long time, and then he went back out to the yard for the last crate.