Colourful watercolour-style lotus tattoo with black outline and blue, pink, orange and green washes, placed on the upper chest.

Watercolour lotus on the chest

Botanical · Chest · Colour · Photo

A lotus flower fills the frame, its petals outlined in fine black linework with soft, bleeding washes of blue, teal, pink, orange, yellow and green. Splashes of colour and small dark dots spread around the outer petals, giving a loose, painterly effect. The design is centred on the upper chest with plain skin visible around it and a thin chain at the top left edge.

Botanical Chest Lotus Flower Petal Bud Watercolour Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The paint would not stay where she put it. Nell tilted the cabin panel against the lock wall and watched the teal bleed out from the petal edge, creeping into the wet pink as if it had somewhere better to be. Her father had painted the lotus on the Hesper the summer before he sold up, quick and sure, and six winters of rain had been lifting it off the boards. She had the fine liner in one hand and a jam jar of rinse water in the other, and she was trying to be as sure as he had been.

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Tomasz came down the towpath with two mugs and stood under the bridge, watching her work. 'You are fighting it,' he said. 'The water wants to go its own way.' She told him to hold the mugs still. She traced the outer petals in black, slow, and the ink sat crisp on the dry patch where the bud was, the way her father's had. Where the wash ran off into the speckles she let it be. A flick of ultramarine from the loaded brush landed on the rail with a sound like a drop of rain, and she thought about leaving that too.

By dusk the lock had emptied and the Hesper sat low in the chamber, her hull wet and bright. Nell stepped back onto the towpath and looked at the panel. The new lotus was not her father's. Its petals were bolder, one bloom bleeding into the next, and the dots at its edge were nothing she had planned. Tomasz set a mug in her hands. 'Leave it,' he said. 'It looks like it's opening.' She didn't argue. The gates groaned, the water began to climb, and the flower rose with the boat.