Black and grey realistic lily tattoo with ink splashes and partial script above, sitting on the upper arm.

Black and grey lilies on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two lily blooms are shown in a realistic style, one near the top of the upper arm and one lower down, with a third bud-like form between them. The petals and stamens are rendered with soft smooth shading and strong highlights, set against a dark smoky background with drips and splatter effects. Only black and grey ink is used, and a small fragment of script runs along the top left edge of the design.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Lily Flower Splatter Script Shading

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lilies in Maud Carrow's orchard were the only white things left once the charcoal burners came down off the hill. Their smoke settled on the apple boughs and in the grass, and it settled on the lilies too, so that by late August every bloom had gone the colour of wet slate at the edges. People said it was a shame. Maud said nothing and went on picking.

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Her neighbour, a wheelwright named Tobias Hale, came one evening with a pail of river water and asked her plainly why she did not cut them back. She said the lilies had not asked to be burned, and she was not going to decide for them what they should look like. He thought this foolish. He went home, dipped his brush in soot and water, and painted a lily on the lintel of his barn, and it came out heavier than any lily had a right to be.

Through the autumn the painted lily dripped. Rain ran down the boards in black threads, and in the mornings there were spatters on the cobbles beneath it, and the children said the flower was weeping ink. Tobias stopped sleeping well. One frosty morning Maud came up the lane with her apron full of late windfalls and stood under the lintel a long time. Then she pressed one apple into his hands and told him the drips would stop when he stopped trying to make the flower look finished.

He did not believe her. But he scraped the lintel down to bare wood, and the next summer, when Maud's lilies opened over the orchard wall, the smoke had thinned and the blooms were white again, with a grey shadow where the petals met. The barn stayed bare. Nobody ever asked him to paint it again.