Sacred script and lotus on a forearm
Botanical · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo
The tattoo covers the forearm with rows of stylised script set in vertical columns, with a band across the top. Below, lotus flowers with flame-like curls form the base, drawn in fine black linework with grey shading. The palette is entirely black and grey against a blurred red and grey graffiti wall.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Sit nearer, the lamp's still warm. You want to hear about Idris Vaughan's arm, the one he kept rolled down at chapel. Everyone in Tynewydd knew the marks were there, rows of black letters like a hymn sheet gone wrong, and none of us asked. Then the pit flooded in the wet spring of 1911, and Idris came up out of the lamp room with a bandaged wrist and said the monk had told him the letters would keep the roof off his head.
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He had been a stoker on a Rhondda steamer when the ship put in at Bangkok, and he went up a river to a temple where the lotus opened on black water every morning. The monk laid his forearm across one knee, dipped a bamboo needle in soot and ran the old script down the skin in columns, the way a clerk rules a ledger. Idris said it hurt like being handed a hot coal, and the monk laughed and said, good, then you will remember.
The miners teased him over the lotus at the wrist end. Lotus, they said, is for Sunday hats and grown women. But Idris never once lost a man in the cage. When fire-damp came up the Number Four level in 1923, he walked the boys out in the dark, holding that arm up to the lamp so they could read the way home from the marks. Chapel men still argue whether that was faith or nonsense. I only know the boys walked out, and Idris came up last, humming.
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