Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised lotus flower design

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows a lotus flower drawn as a solid black silhouette with layered, pointed petals arranged symmetrically. The outlines are bold and uniform, with the inner petals separated by thin white gaps. The design is in black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Botanical Lotus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the lotus will not survive a Lincolnshire February, and you have decided not to believe it. The tin came by post from your uncle in Colombo, wrapped in brown paper and two sheets of the Saltergate Mercury, and inside the tuber lay in damp sawdust like something sleeping. Mr Pargeter at the ironmongers wants the old trough behind the chapel hall cleared for stock tanks. Your mother wants the kitchen back. So every night after the shutters come down, you carry hot water from the copper in two enamel buckets and kneel at the galvanised rim, counting days.

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By April the first leaf broke the surface, round and flat as a half-crown. By June the stems were thick as your wrist, and the buds rose out of the water tightly furled. Each morning you found them a little more open, the outer petals lifting first and the inner ones following in layers, as though someone were unfolding a letter one fold at a time. Mrs Ashdown from the post office stopped her pram to stare. Word got round, and boys climbed the chapel wall after school to see.

On the first Sunday of July the vicar came to the trough himself, hat in hand, and asked whether it was true the thing had no roots in English soil. You told him it did not need any. It only needed someone to keep the water warm. He looked at you a long while before he said he would write to your uncle.

That night you sat on the chapel step and watched the bloom close, one pointed petal folding over the next until it stood as a single dark shape against the lamp in the hall window. You had always assumed it was shutting out the night. Now you think it was only keeping its place, the way you keep yours in a queue, ready to open again at first light.