Solid black stencil-style lotus flower design on a white background, with bold petal shapes and no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised lotus flower design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A bold black silhouette of a stylised lotus flower with several pointed petals arranged around a open centre. The design uses solid black fills with white negative space cut into the petals, with no shading or greys. It is shown on a plain white background with no body part visible.

Botanical Lotus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now, sit closer, the pair of you, because the fire will sulk if I don't keep an eye on it, and this is the part where Bessie Crane went out past the last stile at Hollin with a bread knife and a lie ready in her pocket.

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The mere lies behind the wood, where the beeches give way to rushes and nobody is ever quite sure how deep the water goes. Out of it grows a lotus that nobody planted. Its petals are black as a chimney's throat, and every one has a set of white windows cut clean through, so the moon comes in through them in little pieces. My grandfather said you could count the windows and know how many years the village had left. Children dared each other to touch it. The ones who did never told the same story twice, which I suppose is why the dares kept going.

That winter the fever took the miller's wife, and the healer said only a steeping of the black petal would ease her. So Bessie went out over the ice in her stockinged feet, sure that a flower so dark would not mind one small thief. She reached for the nearest petal and found it already folded tight as a fist. But when she pressed her face close and counted the white windows, she found one more than there were houses in Hollin. The extra one was small and yellow. It was the lamp in her own kitchen, and her mother was still sitting up beside it, waiting.

Bessie cut nothing. She walked home with frost in her hair and sat by the bed until morning, and her mother lived until spring, which is more than the healer promised. The flower stayed shut all that winter. Some say it is still shut, keeping its count. Now, who's for the last of the cider, and who's going to be first to bed?