Sketch-style lotus flower tattoo in magenta and turquoise washes with loose black linework, on the upper arm and shoulder.

Sketchy lotus flower on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large lotus flower covers the upper arm and shoulder, drawn with loose, sketchy black linework that overlaps the petals. Soft magenta and turquoise washes fill the petals unevenly, with small splatter dots around the edges. The composition is centred on the shoulder, with the bloom spreading down the arm.

Botanical Upper arm Shoulder Lotus Flower Petal Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond at Hollin Farm had lain dry for three summers when Maud Ashby carried a sack of seed down the lane from her uncle's glasshouse in Norwich. The village said the roots would rot in the cold clay. The vicar's wife said so twice, once at the well and once outside the chapel, and Maud only nodded and kept walking with the sack on her hip.

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Before she planted anything she sat on the bank and drew the bloom in ink on the back of a seed packet. She could not hold a flower still long enough to see its shape, so she drew it fast, letting the lines cross and double back where her hand wanted to go. In the evenings she mixed her paints from pressed petals and a little rainwater, magenta for the heart of it and a cold turquoise for the edges, and she brushed them on loosely so the colour would bleed where it pleased.

In the spring the first bud broke the surface looking unfinished, its outline shaking in the wind, its petals washed unevenly with colour. People walked out from the village to see it. A boy from the mill asked why the flower had not been finished, and Maud told him the flower was finished, and that it was the rest of them who were still sketching.

Every autumn after that she let the seed heads drop into the water. By the next July the pond held a dozen blooms, and the ink on the old packet had softened and run in the damp, but if you stood at the bank and squinted you could still see where she had meant each line to go.