Dotwork drawing of a lotus flower in black stipple above three lines of italic text, shown as a tattoo design with no body visible.

Stippled lotus flower with quote

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A lotus flower with layered, pointed petals is drawn in black stippling, with the centre and petal bases shaded by dense dots. Three lines of italic serif text sit beneath the flower on a plain off-white background. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with generous empty space around the design.

Dotwork Botanical Lotus Flower Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent comes down in a field outside Ashford, and the rain has turned the ground to porridge, so every guy rope sucks at its peg as if it doesn't want to let go. You sit on an upturned crate under the tailgate of the lorry, mending a sequinned bodice across your knee, because somebody has to keep the costumes from falling apart before the buyers arrive. Nobody else is bothering.

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Behind the winter quarters there is a pond that Dessie dug the year the elephants retired, when he swore the paddock needed water that didn't belong to the cows. He filled it with silt from the river and forgot about it. Nobody believed a lotus would come up out of that muck, least of all in Kent. This spring it did. Every morning you walk down with a tin of stale bread for the ducks and count the petals that have opened overnight, pale and stubborn, stood up on their stalks like they've been invited.

The man from the leisure company walks the site with a clipboard and says the word heritage as though it's a stone in his shoe. He asks what the pond is for. Caro, who still wears her ringmaster's jacket to buy milk, tells him the flower opens at dawn, closes at dusk and comes back the next day, which is more than the circus has managed for thirty years. He writes something down anyway.

When the lorries leave, you stay behind a while. The buyers will sell the tent, the painted horses and the wagons with their gold lettering, and they will never think to ask about the pond. You crouch at its edge and watch the nearest bloom catch the light, rising out of the mud as though it has never once been buried.