Teal and sage green stencil design of a symmetrical lotus flower with layered petals on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised lotus flower stencil

Botanical · Colour · Flash

A symmetrical lotus flower made of layered, pointed petals, with the upper petals in teal and the lower leaves in sage green. The linework is solid and filled, with no shading, and the design is centred on a plain white background. It reads as a stencil or flash design rather than a photograph of skin.

Botanical Lotus Flower Leaves Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rice had gone grey at the edges again, and Maud Tennick swore at it the way her grandmother had taught her, low, so the boys on the midday watch would not hear. The Corinna was four weeks out of Gravesend with a hold full of tea and not one green thing aboard. Men living on salt beef and biscuit grow quiet, and Maud knew quiet was the start of trouble.

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It was the cabin boy who found the seed. He had it in his pocket, a hard brown pod no bigger than a thimble, won off a fireman from Calcutta at dice. Maud took it from him, gave him a biscuit for his trouble, and set the pod in a bucket of seawater on the galley sill. Her grandmother had said the lotus grew in mud and still opened every morning, and that a cook who kept one bloom alive would never go short of kindness in her own kitchen.

Nothing came of it for nine days. On the tenth dawn a shoot broke the water, and by the next night there were leaves, sage and pale as the underside of a gull's wing. The bloom came on the twelfth morning, teal at the tips, folding and unfolding over the stove. The men stopped at the galley door to look, and then they stopped swearing at the rice.

When the Corinna raised the Rock of Gibraltar, Maud carried the bucket up on deck and tipped the seed into the bay. Some say the water took it. The cabin boy says it still opens every morning over the sea, and that he has never once seen it shut.