Black fine line flash design of a seated, cross-legged figure with lotus flowers, a spiral eye, a globe and a heart, set within an ornate outlined frame.

Seated lotus figure with globe and eye flash

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical line drawing of a seated, cross-legged figure with long flowing hair, holding lotus stems in raised hands. A lotus flower sits above the head beneath a spiral eye, a heart shape marks the chest, and a globe rests over the lap, with a lotus below. The design is drawn in single black fine lines with dot accents and sits inside layered outlined frames on a pale background.

Fine line Botanical Seated figure Lotus Eye Spiral Globe Heart Hair Frame Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gulls have started their argument over the fish boxes by the time you climb to the end of the breakwater, and nobody in Porthally asks why you sit there at five in the morning with your legs folded and your palms turned upward. They assume you are waiting for the Morwenna to come in. You are waiting for the harbour to go still, which it does for perhaps four minutes before the first engine turns over.

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Hetty Varcoe taught you that stillness, though she would never have called it that. She ran the chandlery on the quay with a brass globe on the counter, its painted seas scuffed grey where customers had rested their thumbs, and she kept the tide tables in a biscuit tin under the till. Read the water before you read the paper, she said, pressing a chart flat with the heel of her hand. Her lines were all hard-edged rope and sharp corners. Yours, she said, were too soft, and you never decided whether she meant it as a criticism.

The autumn she died, you found a sheet of tracing paper folded inside the tin. On it she had drawn the bay the way she saw it from the breakwater, not the way charts show it: a seated figure, a spiral where the channel turned, a heart where the mooring chains met. Beneath it, in the careful capitals she used for hazard warnings, she had written STAY UNTIL IT SETTLES.

Now you climb the steps each morning with the drawing folded in your coat. When the first engine starts and the boats swing on their moorings, you open your hands and let the stems fall, and every hull in the harbour turns to face the same way.