White ink lotus and swirls on upper back

Ottoline Breck came off the Scarborough train in 1931 with a leather case of needles and a bottle of white ink she'd bought from a chemist in Leeds. Nobody in the town had seen a tattoo that didn't shout. She said dark ink was for sailors who wanted to be remembered loudly, and she wanted her flowers to be the sort you only noticed once someone told you they were there. She stayed three weeks in the back parlour, working on whoever could sit still, and she charged a shilling and a slice of seed cake.

The lotus you're looking at was the last one she did. Ada Ardagh had buried a husband off a trawler that winter and wanted something on her skin that nobody at the breakfast table could read. Ottoline pricked it out one layer of petals at a time, then the dot at the heart, then the curling vine that runs down towards the shoulder blade. When she'd finished, Ada held the hand mirror over her shoulder and saw nothing but a pink patch of skin. Ottoline laughed and said give it a month of sea air and you'll see.

Ada kept it for forty years and never once showed a guest. Then, in the last summer before she sold the house, a girl with a sketchbook asked why the wallpaper upstairs had the same flower pressed into it. Ada turned her back to the window, and the light found it. There, she said. Now you've seen it. Mind you don't tell the gulls.