Black and grey lily tattoo with shaded leaves on an upper arm, shown in a side view and a close-up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey lily on an upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey lily, shown with large petals and bold outlines, is surrounded by shaded leaves on the upper arm. The petals use soft grey shading and the leaves are filled with dense dark stippling and hatching. The left panel shows the arm in a wider view, while the right panel is a close-up of the same tattoo.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the ninth floor of Carrow House could say who had first pushed the bulb into the crack by the stairwell door. Mrs Pell swore it was the wind. Her son said it was the pigeons. Dilys Hart, who had lived in flat 41 since the blocks were new, said the lily had been there before the concrete, and that the builders had only poured around it out of respect.

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The lily grew in spite of the council. Each spring it pushed through the grey render, its leaves stacked like the scales of a fish, and each spring the caretaker scraped it back with a stiff brush and a bucket of bleach. Each spring it came back wider. Dilys took to leaving a saucer of rainwater at its root and a plain digestive on the Sunday, because her mother had told her that anything which would not be beaten should at least be fed.

When the lift failed for the third time that winter, the children climbed the stairs to find the flower open in the dark, its petals pale as candle wax and dusted with frost. Dilys sat on the top step with them and told them the old saying: a lily opens only for someone who has come a long way up. Her grandson laughed. She didn't. Next morning the bleach bucket was gone from the landing, and the lily had spread across two steps, its leaves creeping up the banister toward the roof.

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