Black and grey lotus flower tattoo with three blooms and stems on the side of the ribs, shaded in a botanical style.

Three lotus flowers down the side ribs

Botanical · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

Three lotus flowers with long curving stems run diagonally across the side of the torso, the largest in the centre with two smaller blooms above left and below right. The petals are outlined in solid black and filled with soft grey shading that gives them depth and a slightly three-dimensional look. The tattoo is shown in black and grey ink on smooth skin against a plain, neutral background.

Botanical Ribs Lotus Flower Bud Stem Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the third wet week the big top had more patches than canvas, and the takings would not buy the mules their oats. Ada Corran rowed the flat-bottomed punt out to the lotus pond before the ticket man was awake, because her grandmother had planted the seeds in a tin bath the season the show first crossed the Tyne, and nobody in four generations had let them die.

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The council had sent a man called Gell with a clipboard and a yellow hat. He stood on the bank in his good shoes and told her the field was wanted for houses, that the pond was a hazard, and that the show had until Michaelmas. Ada kept pushing the punt through the leaves. Her grandmother used to say the flowers opened only for whoever had stopped pretending, and the old woman had never said which of them that was.

That night the rain stopped. Ada sat on the wagon steps with a lamp and watched the water. The largest bloom came first, slow as a hand unclenching, its petals grey in the lamplight and rimmed with dark. Then a smaller one lifted on a long stem by the reeds, and a third low down near the roots, like a child who had waited to be asked. Gell had walked out into the mud without a torch, and he stood with his hat in both hands, saying nothing at all.

In the morning he came back with the clipboard under his arm, and he had not written anything on it. He asked whether the show needed a man who could sweep sawdust and mend canvas. Ada said the ringmaster would want paying in tickets. Gell said that would do. By autumn the pond had been dredged, the council's letter sat unopened under a jar of pond water, and the seed heads rattled in their tin like coins.