Colour tattoo of a skull above a purple lotus, framed by wave-like swirls, in a Japanese-influenced style on a lower leg.

Skull and lotus on a calf

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A human skull sits above a purple lotus flower, with yellow petals and dark wave-like swirls framing both sides. The skull is shaded in soft greys with pale highlights, while the lotus uses bold, saturated purple with dark outlines and shading. The design fills the frame against a black background, with a grey fabric edge visible at the top.

Japanese Neo-trad Other Skull Lotus Flower Wave Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mara had been told the moat was dry, so when she waded down the slope in her wellingtons and felt the mud give under her heel, she assumed it was just the rain talking. The castle at Carrick Hollow had been roofless since her grandfather's time, its walls furred with ivy and its keep split like a loaf. Nobody came up the track now except walkers and the man from the water board, who only wanted the sluice cleared.

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The skull lay half-sunk among the reeds at the moat's lowest point, pale as a candle stub, its eye sockets full of silt. Beside it, rooted in the black water that still pooled there, a lotus had pushed up its first pad of the season, and the pad was furled tight like a fist. Mara knelt and brushed the mud from the brow. Her grandfather had kept a Japanese print pinned above the kitchen sink, a woman in a boat beneath a wave, and he used to say that every pond was only a skull with better manners.

She carried it up to the kitchen door in a feed sack and set it on the table between the teapot and the radio. The water board man came on Thursday and looked at it for a long time. "Old," he said. "Probably a monk's, probably nothing to do with the castle at all." He left without the sluice cleared.

By August the lotus had opened on the pool, a deep plum bloom, and its petals curled around the place where the skull had been. Mara sat on the wall in the evening and watched the bloom close for the night, slow as a hand. She did not dig the skull back up. Some things, she decided, were better kept in the mud, where the flower could keep them company.