Black and grey fine line water lily tattoo on the upper arm, with delicate petal linework and shaded centre.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Water lily on the upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A water lily in profile sits on the outer upper arm, drawn with fine, layered petal outlines and soft grey shading. The centre is built up with dense dark strokes and fine radiating lines, giving depth to the bloom. The ink is black and grey only, set against pale skin and a black top, with the flower placed centrally on the arm.

Fine line Botanical Upper arm Lotus Flower Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pond sat at the bottom of Harrow's orchard, past the last row of Bramley trees, and by the second week of August the water lilies had filled it edge to edge. My grandfather called them cups. He would wade out in his rubber boots, pull a bloom toward him with the long hook he used for dredging, and tell me to count the petals before the sun got at them. Eleven, usually. Sometimes twelve, if the bloom was young.

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The orchard was failing that summer. The apples dropped early, bruised in the grass, and the wasps came in drunk on the windfalls. Dad wanted to sell the lower field to the estate people from Ashford. Grandad said nothing about it. He only kept going down to the pond each morning with his flask, and each morning I went with him, counting.

The morning the buyers came to walk the land, I found him sitting on the bank with the hook across his knees, not dredging anything. He said the lilies opened at dawn and shut by noon every day of their lives, and nobody ever asked them to stay open. Then he pointed at the dark heart of the nearest bloom, where the stamens crowded in close and tight as wire, and said that was where the lily kept its business. The petals were only there to be looked at.

I sold nothing. I went back at dusk, the pond gone flat and grey, and every bloom had folded itself shut over its own centre. I counted them anyway, eleven in the first, eleven in the next, and kept counting until the frogs started.