Red lotus flower tattoo with a long thin stem on the upper back, drawn in fine line with soft red shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Red lotus flower on upper back

Fine line · Back · Colour · Photo

A single lotus flower with several curved petals and a long, thin stem sits on the skin of the upper back near the shoulder blade. The linework is delicate and mostly red, with the petals softly shaded in darker and lighter red tones to suggest depth. The flower is set against plain, pale skin, with the stem running down and to the left and one petal floating separately below the bloom.

Fine line Botanical Back Lotus Flower Petal Stem

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond on Haddow Island sits behind the old ferry shed, and by July the lotus have pushed up through the brown water so thick that my uncle Tomas used to say you could hear them creak. I was twelve the summer he taught me to split the tubers with a bread knife and replant them in clay pots, pressing each one down until only the crown showed.

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The red ones were his favourite. He called them the stubborn ones, because they opened later than the white and sulked for a week after every storm. Each morning we walked the causeway at low tide with a flask of tea and counted buds. He never let me pick a flower. "Cut one and it thinks it has been punished," he said, "and it won't do you the courtesy of opening twice."

The year the ferry stopped running, Tomas crossed to the mainland for a hospital appointment and did not come back on the evening boat. I kept the pond alone. In August one petal came loose from a bloom that had gone over in the heat, and the wind caught it and carried it past the reeds toward the channel, turning once, deep red going pale at the edges, like a small boat with nobody aboard.

I did not chase it. I stood on the causeway until the tide covered my shoes, then went back and cut the stems the way he had shown me, leaving the last bud closed for him. It opened the next morning, red to the tips, and I took it as a sign, though Tomas would have said it was only a flower doing what flowers do.