Snake coiled around a lotus flower

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a snake with a raised head, coiled several times and wrapped around the base of an open lotus flower. The snake is shaded with fine scale patterning and soft graphite tones, and the lotus petals are drawn with layered shading. The composition is centred on a vertical column, with the snake's tail curling round the bottom of the flower.

Botanical Snake Lotus Flower Coil Scale

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind off the moat gets into old bones. You want to know why a lotus grows in the ditch of Harrowgate Keep, where no lotus has any business being, and I'll tell you, but mind the broken stair while I talk, for it has taken better men than you.

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Ada Wrenfield kept the water garden in the years before the siege, when the keep still had a roof and a steward who counted the bread. The old cistern under the south tower had gone dry, and out of its cracked stones came a serpent as thick as a drowned man's arm. It coiled itself around the one white bloom a travelling monk had planted, and when Steward Osric came with his billhook to clear the weeds, the snake raised its head and hissed until he backed away over the bridge, swearing. Ada only smiled and brought it milk in a chipped bowl.

When the enemy camped on the hill, Osric ordered the well sealed and the gates chained. Ada heard no water running, but she followed the lotus roots, pale as candle wax, down a crack in the masonry. The snake went first, its tail lifting the stones aside like a clerk turning pages. At the bottom ran a spring so clear the moon sat in it. She carried it up one bucket at a time, and every garrison man who drank from her cup lived to see the morning.

They say the keep fell in the end, and the chain of the drawbridge rusted through. Ada was never found. But on still mornings, when the mist lies thick on the ditch, you can see the lotus open, and a grey coil wrapped round its stem, keeping watch over the water that gave the rest of us our lives.