Small black lotus flower tattoo with a curling stem on the back of a person's neck, in a botanical style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small lotus tattoo on the back of the neck

Botanical · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small lotus flower with pointed black petals and a single curling stem sits on the back of a neck, with dark hair visible at the top of the frame. The linework is solid black and fairly slim, with the petals drawn as outlines and no shading. The pale skin and plain background keep the focus on the tattoo, which sits near the centre of the image.

Botanical Fine line Neck Lotus Flower Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pull your chairs in, all of you, and mind the candle, because I am too old to stop it catching the tablecloth twice in one evening. This is the tale of the pond behind Hallow Mill, and it is true the way the best tales are true, which is to say my grandmother swore to it and never once told a lie she could not dress up better.

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Ada Pickering was eleven when she found the seed in a twist of paper, pressed into her palm by a tinker who wanted a loaf more than he wanted thanks. He said it would grow in mud and nowhere else. Ada believed him, because nobody in Hallow had ever told her anything that was not already sitting in the mud. She dug a hole at the pond's edge with a dessert spoon, pushed the seed in, and walked home with black nails and a stubborn look my grandmother said would outlast the chapel roof.

The first leaf came up the summer her father drowned in the weir and did not come home. The second came the year the mill closed. By the time the bell rang for her own wedding, the stalk had reached the surface and the flower stood open, pale-edged and pointed, the way a thing looks when it has waited a long time to be seen. Its stem curled down into the dark water like a question nobody had bothered to finish asking.

When the parish drained the pond to clear the silt, they found a brass ring tangled in the roots, the one Ada's mother had dropped off the footbridge the night before she left. The stem had been reaching for it all along. So raise your glasses to the bride, who has never dropped anything she meant to keep, and to the pond, which keeps everything it is given, and then to the soup, before it is entirely cold.