Black and grey realistic tattoo of a seated baby Buddha on a lotus flower with an om symbol and dotted droplet chains below, on an upper arm.

Seated Buddha on a lotus, upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A seated baby Buddha with a raised hand and a third-eye dot sits on a large open lotus flower. Below the lotus, an om symbol hangs among chains of dotted beads and teardrop shapes. The piece is shaded in black and grey with smooth gradients on the face and robes and fine stippling on the beads.

Realism Dotwork Upper arm Buddha Lotus Om symbol Bead Droplet Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Old Tenzin had carved the child Buddha for the monastery gate, and when the river took the gate in the wet season, the statue was the only thing left standing in the mud. Pema, sent down from the high ledge to salvage what she could, found it lying on its back with a lotus pond draining out of its lap. She knelt and wiped silt from the small raised palm, the fingers folded into a shape the old carver had always said meant "wait, and then go".

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The beads were the hard part. Tenzin had strung them in chains across the base, dotted and fine, each teardrop a little hammered brass that caught the light. Pema counted them the way her grandmother had counted prayer knots, one per breath. Forty-one in the first swag, thirty-eight in the second. Somewhere between them the om sat still, as if the whole pendant were waiting for someone to come back and finish it.

She did not finish it. She hauled the statue up the terrace on a rope of goat hair with two boys from the lower village and set it facing the dry pond where the lotuses had been. Then she sat cross-legged on the step beside it and waited for the rain, which she had decided, out of stubbornness, would come before dusk.

It did not. Not until the next morning, when a single drop fell from the lowest chain onto her knee, and she realised the beads had been catching water all night, the way they were made to.