Watercolour-style lotus flower on the shoulder with black paintbrushes and a blue wash below, on a person's upper arm.

Watercolour lotus and paintbrushes on upper arm

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A pink, purple and blue lotus flower sits on the shoulder, with five black paintbrushes fanning out down the upper arm and tied with a blue, bow-like wash. The outlines on the petals and brush handles are thin and dark, while the colour is applied in loose washes that bleed past the edges, giving a painted look. Colour ink dominates, with pinks, purples, blues and touches of orange, and the arm is framed close with a blurred background.

Shoulder Upper arm Lotus Flower Watercolour Bow Wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brushes had been soaking in the jar since Tuesday, and Mrs Okonedo swore they would never lift again. Nell didn't argue. She dragged the stool to the shop window of Pell and Daughter Signs, wiped the rain streaks off the glass with her sleeve, and tipped the last tin of cerulean into a saucer with a chip out of its rim.

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Her grandmother had painted a lotus on the back of every sign she ever made, always the same flower, always rising out of something muddy and opening clean. Nell wet the brush, loaded it with rose madder, and laid the pink down first. Then she dropped in the blue and let the two run together past the pencil lines, the way Gran used to say. You let a colour go where it wants, and the flower comes out better for it.

By noon the lotus was sitting on the glass like something that had floated up from the harbour. Nell had painted five black brush handles beneath it, fanned out and bound with a wash of blue she had tied off with a single stroke, and the whole thing looked less like a sign and more like a bouquet someone had forgotten to deliver.

A man in a wet wax jacket stopped outside and read the window twice. He asked what it was advertising. Nell told him it wasn't advertising anything, and that the shop was not, in fact, closing. He looked at the flower for a long time, then went on up the hill without asking the price, and Nell sat on the stool watching the pink bleed slowly into the wet pavement.