Watercolour-style pink and blue lotus flower tattoo with black linework and ink splashes running up the ankle, shown against a dark leather seat.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour lotus flower on an ankle

Botanical · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a foot and ankle with a large lotus flower tattoo, drawn with dark outlines and filled with soft pink and blue washes. Loose blue and black ink splashes trail up the ankle and shin, giving the piece a painterly, bleeding effect. The tattoo fills the lower ankle, and the skin is shown against a dark textured leather surface.

Botanical Ankle Flower Lotus Splash Petal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marlowe Palais had a ceiling of tin stars, and I was the only one who ever looked up at it. Every spring Mr Gorse sent me up the ladder with a pot of cerulean and a jar of rose madder to touch up the proscenium, and every spring I climbed a little slower than the year before. Nobody else cared that the paint was flaking. They danced under it anyway, foxtrotting in their Sunday shoes.

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The summer Dorrie Ashcombe came to sing with the Kenny Vane Orchestra, she stood at the edge of the stage with a glass of lemonade and asked me what I'd paint if the hall were mine. I told her a lotus, the kind my father had seen in a book about Burma, opening on dark water. She laughed and said it sounded like something you'd find at the bottom of a fishpond. I didn't mind. I was already mixing it in my head: the pink bleeding into the blue where the water met the petals.

We painted it together on the back wall of the dressing room, a secret thing, rolling washes with brushes we'd nicked from the scenery store. Where we flicked the ink too hard, the blue ran down the plaster in black-edged streaks, and Mr Gorse found it on a Monday and nearly sacked me. Then the November gale took half the roof off, and rain came straight through the stars and onto the flower. By morning the whole wall was bleeding pink and blue into the floorboards.

Dorrie left on the first train in December, and the hall was sold to a bingo firm the following spring. I never painted over that wall. I still think of it, the water that carried the colours further than we had meant them to go, and how the petals kept opening anyway.