Black and grey shaded lotus flower tattoo with layered petals and a closed bud, on the lower torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Shaded black and grey lotus flower

Botanical · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large lotus flower fills the frame, with its outer petals open and a closed bud at the bottom centre. The petals and stamens are shaded in smooth black and grey tones, with bold outlines and light highlights giving volume. The skin is shown at close range against a plain background, with no other colour in the composition.

Botanical Realism Other Lotus Flower Petal Bud Stamen

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Winifred had her sleeves rolled to the elbow and one hand deep in the pond when the heron came down on the far wall, folding itself like an umbrella. She didn't look up. She was feeling along the mud for the tuber she'd been told to leave alone in March, the one Teodor from the allotments swore would sulk for three summers before it bothered with a flower.

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"Three summers," she muttered at it. "I've given you two."

The water had gone the colour of strong tea over the last fortnight, and the leaves that should have lain flat like saucers had curled and gone the dark grey of wet slate. Only the bud remained, a closed fist at the centre of the bed, its outer sheath tight as a hand that refused to open. She had photographed it every morning for a month and sent the pictures to nobody, because nobody would have understood what they were for.

Her husband had called lotus flowers show-offs. They opened in the morning, he said, shut again by teatime, and never once let you see the mud they came from. He had been wrong about that. She knew it now, her fingers closing round the root, cold and firm and entirely unwilling to be dragged up into October.

She left it where it was. She sat back on the flagstones, wiped her hands on her apron, and watched the bud through the cloudy water until the heron lost interest and the light went out of the garden. In the morning, she thought, she would be the one who was up first.